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CHARLES LAMB 
From the water color drawing by G. F. Joseph, (18 J 9) 



LAME 



Essays of Elia 



(CHOSEN' 




The Old 
Press* 

NewKiriL 




Greek. 

GAicaoo 
Boston 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

Copyright Entry 

A/fo 7. 
SS A xXc.,Ne. 

COPY B. 







i 9 



COPYRIGHT, I907 
BY SHERWIN CODY 



CONTENTS 

Lamb, Life .......... 7 

Essays of Elia. 



The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple 33 

Dream Children ; A Reverie 49 

My First Play 54 

Amicus Redivivus 61 

A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig 68 

Poor Relations 78 

Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist 88 

Old China 98 

Imperfect Sympathies 106 

The Superannuated Man 118 



LAMB 

If you would read the works of Charles Lamb, 
you must know Charles Lamb the man, for he is 
the principal character in his own writings (at 
least-those that we remember now and really care 
to read), and our love for the works and our love 
for the man are one and inseparable. The best a 
critic or biographer can do is to arrange Lamb's 
letters and essays in suitable order, and add a few 
hard facts here and there to make the connection 
plain. 

In the heart of the old corporate city of London 
is a series of groups of buildings called the Inns 
of Court. There were and still are four of these 
"Inns," which are societies or corporations for the 
education of law students. In their old-fashioned 
way they correspond to our law schools. The courts 
are there, too, and the lawyers, young and old, have 
"chambers" there, where, amid ancient traditions 
and somewhat gloomy surroundings, they live and 
even keep their families, or at least their servants' 
families. 

Born in the Law Courts of the Inner Temple. 

Of these four "Inns," one of the most famous is 
"The Inner Temple," a name which hints of the fact 
that the law was originally administered by the 
clergy, who had their chapels here. "The Inner 

7 



8 LAMB 

Temple" was the general name for a group of build- 
ings, including a little park. At No. 2 Crown Of- 
fice Row, Charles Lamb was born Feb. 10, 1775, the 
youngest of seven children, only two of whom lived 
to grow up. His father, John Lamb, was the clerk, 
companion, and servant of Samuel Salt, a "Bencher" 
(one of the governing board of the school), and, 
with his family, occupied one of the two sets of 
chambers belonging to Samuel Salt. 

In his essay on the Old Benchers, Lamb describes 
his father under the name of Lovel. He took ab- 
solute charge of Samuel Salt, and "was at once his 
clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his 
'flapper/ his guide, his stop-watch, auditor, treas- 
urer." Salt "did nothing without consulting Lovel, 
or failed in anything without expecting and fearing 
his admonishing." "L. was the liveliest little fellow 
breathing," Lamb goes on, "had a face as gay as 
Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble 
(I have a portrait of him which confirms it), pos- 
sessed a fine turn for humorous poetry — next to 
Swift and Prior — moulded heads in clay or plaster 
of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural ge- 
nius merely; turned cribbage boards, and such 
small cabinet toys, to perfection ; took a hand at 
quadrille or bowls with equal facility; made punch 
better than any man of his degree in England; had 
the merriest quips and conceits, and was altogether 
as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could 
desire." 

And here is Lamb's picture of Samuel Salt: "S. 
had the reputation of being a very clever man, and 



LIFE 9 

of excellent discernment in the chamber practice of 
law. I suspect his knowledge did not amount to 
much. When a case of difficult disposition of money, 
testamentary or otherwise came before him he ordi- 
narily handed it over with a few instructions to his 
man Lovel, who was a quick little fellow, and would 
dispatch it out of hand by the light of natural 
understanding, of which he had an uncommon share. 
It was incredible what repute for talents S. en- 
joyed" by the mere trick of gravity. He was a shy 
man; a child might pose him in a minute — indolent 
and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet men 
would give him credit for vast application in spite 
of himself. He was not to be trusted with himself 
with impunity. He never dressed for a dinner party 
but he forgot his sword — they wore swords then — 
or some other necessary part of his equipage. Lovel 
had his eye upon him on all these occasions, and 
ordinarily gave him his cue. If there was anything 
which he could speak unseasonably, he was sure to 
do it. He was to dine at a relative's of the unfor- 
tunate Miss Blandy on the day of her execution, 
and L., who had a wary foresight of his probable 
hallucinations, before he set out schooled him with 
great anxiety not in any possible manner to allude 
to her story that day. S. promised faithfully to ob- 
serve the injunction. He had not been seated in 
the parlour where the company was expecting the 
dinner summons, four minutes when, a pause in the 
conversation ensuing, he got up, looked out of the 
window, and, pulling down his ruffles — an ordinary 
motion with him — observed, 'It was a gloomy day,' 



10 LAMB 

and added, 'Miss Blandy must be hanged by this 
time, I suppose.' 

"Instances of this sort were perpetual. Yet S. 
was thought by some of the greatest men of his 
time a fit person to be consulted, not alone in mat- 
ters pertaining to the law, but in the ordinary nice- 
ties and embarrassments of conduct — from force of 
manner entirely. He never laughed. He had the 
same good fortune among the female world — was a 
known toast with the ladies, and one or two are said 
to have died for love of him — I suppose because he 
never trifled or talked gallantry with them, or paid 
them, indeed, hardly common attentions. He had a 
fine face and person." 

Aunt Hetty. 

In the Lamb family was a sister of Mr. Lamb, 
known as "Aunt Hetty." Mary Lamb describes her 
in a letter as follows : "My father had a sister who 
lived with us — of course, lived with my mother, 
her sister-in-law ; they were, in their different ways, 
the best creatures in the world, but they set out 
wrong at first. They made each other miserable 
for full twenty years of their lives. My mother 
was a perfect gentlewoman, my aunty as unlike a 
gentlewoman as you can possibly imagine a good 
old woman to be; so that my dear mother (who, 
though you do not know it, is always in my poor 
head and heart) used to distress and weary her 
with incessant and unceasing attention and polite- 
ness, to gain her affection. 

The old woman could not return this in kind, 



LIFE 11 

and did not know what to make of it — thought it 
all deceit, and used to hate my mother with a bitter 
hatred — which, of course, was soon returned with 
interest. A little frankness, and looking into each 
other's characters at first, would have spared all 
this, and they would have lived, as they died, fond 
of each other for the last few years of their life." 

Says Mr. Lucas, Lamb's biographer: "Probably 
Aunty Hetty found in her little nephew (Charles 
Lamb) the understanding that she needed ; for im- 
aginative sympathy, of which Charles Lamb had so 
great a share, is not a graft, but, in those who are 
blessed with it, a possession from their earliest 
days. One of Aunt Hetty's methods of requiting 
his comforting comprehension of her temperament 
was very practical," namely, giving him cakes, a sub- 
ject to which he alludes in that passage in the "Essay 
on Roast Pig," in which he speaks of giving his cake 
to a beggar. And when Lamb went away to school 
he fared much better than the others by reason of 
Aunt Hetty's provisions. 

In the Blue-Coat School with Coleridge. 

As for Charles Lamb himself, we know he must 
have had a sense of humor from the earliest years, 
for when he was a child, Talfourd tells us, he was 
walking through a graveyard with his sister Mary, 
ten years older than he, and they read the inscrip- 
tions, all telling of the wonderful virtues of the dead, 
when the little fellow asked naively, "Mary, where 
are the naughty people buried?" - 

When the boy was seven and a half years old he 



12 LAMB 

was admitted to Christ's Hospital, the famous "Blue- 
coat School," where so many famous writers have 
been educated, and whose boys in their long blue 
coats, knee breeches, and yellow stockings, with 
never a hat or cap on their heads, were familiar 
figures on the streets of London only a few years 
ago. The old school building has now been sold 
and the school itself removed to the country. 

Coleridge, the poet, was admitted at almost the 
same time, though he was ten years old, and he 
became one of Lamb's closest and lifelong friends. 
Another of his school fellows was Charles Valen- 
tine Le Grice, who describes him as follows : "Lamb," 
he says, "was an amiable, gentle boy, very sensible 
and keenly observing, indulged by his school fellows 
and by his master on account of his infirmity of 
speech.* His countenance was mild; his complexion 
clear brown, with an expression which might lead 
you to think that he was of Jewish descent. His 
eyes were not each of the same colour, one was 
hazel, the other had specks of grey in the iris, min- 
gled as we see red spots in the bloodstone. His 
step was plantigrade, which makes his walk slow 
and peculiar, adding to the staid appearance of his 
figure. I never heard his name mentioned without 
the addition of Charles, although, as there was no 
other boy of the name of Lamb, the addition was 
unnecessary; but there was an implied kindness in 
it, and it was a proof that his gentle manners ex- 
cited that kindness. 



*Lamb was a stammerer all his life. 



LIFE 13 

"His delicate frame and his difficulty of utter- 
ance, which was increased by agitation, unfitted him 
for joining in any boisterous sport. The description 
which he gives, in his 'Recollections of Christ's Hos- 
pital/ of the habits and feelings of the schoolboy, is 
true in general, but is more particularly a delinea- 
tion of himself — the feelings were all in his own 
heart-^-the portrait was his own : 'While others were 
all fire and play, he stole along with all the self- 
concentration of a young monk.' These habits and 
feelings were awakened and cherished in him by 
peculiar circumstances ; he had been born and bred 
in the Inner Temple; and his parents continued to 
reside there while he was at school, so he passed 
from cloister to cloister, and this was all the change 
his young mind ever knew. On every half-holiday 
(and there were two in the week) in ten minutes he 
was in the gardens, on the terrace, or at the foun- 
tain of the Temple; here was his home, here his 
recreation ; and the influence they had on his infant 
mind is vividly shown in his description of the Old 
Benchers." 

Christ's Hospital had been founded for the bene- 
fit of the children of gentlemen, and Lamb and Cole- 
ridge were both charity students there. Admission 
had doubtless been procured for Lamb through Sam- 
uel Salt, one of the governors. There were scholar- 
ships which might have enabled Lamb to go on to 
the university, as did a majority of his school fel- 
lows, who were destined for the church. But Lamb's 
impediment in his speech precluded this, so at fif- 
teen he left Christ's Hospital and two years later 



14 LAMB 

we find him a clerk under his brother, John Lamb, 
at the South Sea House, which was the subject of 
his first essay. He did not stay there long, how- 
ever, for Samuel Salt died in 1792 and the Lambs 
moved away from the Inner Temple, probably to 
Little Queen street. Both Mr. and Mrs. Lamb were 
remembered in Samuel Salt's will, and doubtless had 
accumulated considerable savings, though we soon 
hear of Mary Lamb at work as a mantua-maker. 
Within two months Charles was established in a 
new position in the East India house, where he re- 
mained for thirty-three years, finally retiring with a 
pension. He was a clerk or bookkeeper in the ac- 
countant's office and playfully referred to his "real 
works" as the hundred odd volumes which he filled 
with commercial entries. 

His Only Love Affair. 

Lamb lived and died a bachelor, but he had a 
love affair with a girl he afterward in his essays 
called Alice W . She was probably Ann Sim- 
mons, and he met her, it is supposed, during visits 
at his grandmother's, who lived in the country at 
Blakesware. He probably spent part of the two 
months between his leaving the South Sea House 
and his entry upon his duties at the India House at 
Blakesware, and here the romance reached its ma- 
turity. Nothing came of it, perhaps on account of 
Lamb's tendency to insanity, and the subsequent in- 
sanity of his sister Mary. That it was more than a 
youthful romance we have no reason to believe, 
though lovers of Lamb seem to like to dwell upon 



LIFE 15 

it as a serious thing. About all we know of it is 
what Lamb tells us in his essay. Many years later 
he proposed marriage to Fanny Kelly, the actress, 
who was, and long continued to be, an intimate 
friend of his family; but she refused him, and they 
did not let this proposal interfere in their friend- 
ship. 

Lamb's Sister Mary Kills Her Mother. 

Lamb says himself that he was confined for a 
few weeks at one time in a madhouse, but he soon 
recovered and never had any return of the malady. 
Such was not the case with his sister Mary. She 
had been working hard, caring for her mother, who 
was ill and to whom she was devoted, and also la- 
boring assiduously as a mantua-maker, in Septem- 
ber, 1796, when, on September 22nd, she suddenly 
became violently insane and stabbed her mother to 
death. She wounded her father, but not seriously. 
Lamb in a letter to Coleridge says he came in only 
in time to snatch the knife from her hand. She was 
immediately removed to a madhouse and placed in 
confinement. 

On the 3rd of October Lamb wrote to Coleridge : 
"It will be a comfort to you to know that our pros- 
pects are somewhat brighter. My poor dear dearest 
sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument of 
the Almighty's judgments to our house, is restored 
to her senses; to a dreadful sense and recollection 
of what has passed, awful to her mind, and impres- 
sive (as it must be to the end of life), but tempered 
with religious resignation, and the reasonings of a 
sound judgment, which in this early stage knows 



16 LAMB 

how to distinguish between a deed committed in a 
transient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a 
mother's murder. I have seen her. I found her this 
morning calm and serene, far, very, very far from 
an indecent forgetful serenity; she has a most af- 
fectionate and tender concern for what has hap- 
pened. Indeed, from the beginning, frightful and 
hopeless as her disorder seemed, I had confidence 
enough in her strength of mind and religious prin 
ciple to look forward to a time when ever she might 
recover tranquillity." 

While the father lived, Mary was not allowed to 
return home; but after his death Charles Lamb 
undertook the care of his sister, and she was released 
on his guarantee to be responsible for her. Barry 
Cornwall says in his memoir of Lamb: "Whenever 
the approach of one of her fits of insanity was an- 
nounced, by some irritability or change of manner, 
Lamb would take her, under his arm, to Hoxton 
asylum. It was very affecting to encounter the 
young brother and his sister walking together (weep- 
ing together) on this painful errand; Mary herself, 
although sad, was very conscious of the necessity for 
temporary separation from her only friend. The; 
used to carry a straight jacket with them." Latei 
as Lamb's finances improved, Mary was cared foi 
privately, either at home or with a nurse elsewhere. 
Her fits lasted apparently for several weeks at ; 
time, when she recovered completely and for a Ion* 
time was her brother's most intimate and helpfu* 
companion, sharing in his literary work, entertain- 
ing his friends, and giving him the loving care he 



LIFE 17 

might otherwise have received from a wife. The 
pair were very fond of each other, and not happy 
when long separated. 

Lamb's Love for London. 

In 1800 Lamb v/as offered rooms with his friend 
Gutch, and he writes to Coleridge, — "I have got three 
rooms (including servant) under £34 a year. Here 
P soon found myself at home; and here, in six 
weeks after, Mary was well enough to join me. So 
we are once more settled, .... I have passed two 
days at Oxford on a visit, which I have long put 
off, to Gutch's family. The sight of the Bodleian 
Library, and, above all, a fine bust of Bishop Taylor 
at All Souls', were particularly gratifying to me; 
unluckily, it was not a family where I could take 
Mary with me, and I am afraid there is something 
of dishonesty in any pleasures I take without her. 
She never goes anywhere." 

Lamb made the acquaintance of Wordsworth and 
his sister Dorothy, and visited Grasmere, but he 
was all his life as passionate a lover of the city as 
Wordsworth was of the country. In a letter to Man- 
fling he says, — "I must confess that I am not ro- 
mance-bit about Nature. The earth, and sea, and sky 
'(when all is said) is but as a house to dwell in. If 
•the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like 
*the conduits at an old coronation, if they can talk 
Sensibly and feel properly, I have no need to stand 
Istaring upon the gilded looking-glass (that strained 
my friend's purse-strings in the purchase), nor his 
five-shilling print over the mantelpiece of old Nabbs 



18 LAMB 

the carrier (which only betrays his false taste). Just 
as important to me (in a sense) is all the furniture 
of my world — eye-pampering, but satisfies no heart. 
Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, 
Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces 
of industrious milliners, neat semptresses, ladies 
cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors 
in the streets with spectacles, George Dyers (you 
may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night, 
pastry cooks, and silversmiths' shops, beautiful Quak- 
ers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of 
mechanic watchmen at night, with bucks reeling home 
drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries 
of 'fire' and 'stop thief; inns of court, with their 
learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cam- 
bridge colleges, old book-stalls, Jeremy Taylors, 
Burtons on Melancholy, and Reli io Medicis on every 
stall ! These are thy pleasures, O London with-the- 
many-sins." 

To the modern reader, Lamb is the literary spirit 
of London. Says Walter Pater in his Apprecia- 
tions : "He felt the genius of places ; and I some- 
times thing he resembles the place he knew and liked 
best — London, sixty-five years ago, with Covent Gar- 
den and the old theatres, and the Temple gardens 
still unspoiled, Thames gliding down, and beyond to 
north and south the fields of Enfield or Hampton, 
to which, 'with their living trees,' the thoughts wan- 
der 'from the hard wood of the desk.' " 

Mary Lamb and Her Brother. 

Though it was Mary Lamb who brought the dark 



LIFE 19 

cloud over the life of her brother, she was his com- 
panion, his collaborator, his friend, filling almost 
adequately the place of a wife to him, as Dorothy 
Wordsworth did for her brother William. Says 
Talfourd, Lamb's first adequate biographer, — "Miss 
Lamb would have been remarkable for the sweetness 
of her disposition, the clearness of her understand- 
ing, and the gentle wisdom of all her acts and words, 
even if these qualities had not been presented in mar- 
vellous contrast with the distraction under which 
she suffered for weeks, latterly for months, every 
year. There was no tinge of insanity discernible in 
her manner to the most observant eye; not even in 
those distressful periods when the premonitory symp- 
toms had apprised her of its approach, and she was 
making preparations for seclusion. In all its essen- 
tial sweetness, her character was like her brother's, 
while, by a temper more placid, a spirit of enjoy- 
ment more serene, she was enabled to guide, to coun- 
sel, to cheer him, and to protect him on the verge 
of the mysterious calamity, from the depths of which 
she rose so often unruffled to his side. To a friend 
in any difficulty she was the most comfortable of ad- 
visers, the wisest of consolers. Hazlitt used to say 
he never met with a woman who could reason, and 
had met with only one thoroughly reasonable — the 
sole exception being Mary Lamb." 

Odd, Quaint, and Curious Friends. 

Lamb had a genius for picking up odd, quaint, and 
curious friends of every description. It mattered not 
to him whether the man had two shirts to his back, 



20 LAMB 

or was able to eat two square meals a day, so he 
had some vein of quaint humor (for many of 
Lamb's friends evidently little suspected their own 
amusing side). 

One of the first of these was George Dyer, whom 
Lamb has immortalized as "G. D." in two of his 
essays, "Oxford in Vacation" and "Amicus Redi- 
vivus." In a letter to Manning (another of his 
friends), dated Nov. 3, 1800, Lamb describes a new 
acquaintance, one after his own heart and charac- 
teristic of the genius he particularly fancied. "I have 
made an acquisition latterly of a pleasant hand," 
says he, "one Rickman, to whom I was introduced 
by George Dyer, not the most flattering auspices 
under which one man can be introduced to another 
— George brings all sorts of people together, setting 
up a sort of agrarian law, or common property, in 
matter of society; but for once he has done me a 
great pleasure, while he was only pursuing a prin- 
ciple, as ignes fatui may light you home. This Rick- 
man lives in our buildings, immediately opposite our 
house; the finest fellow to drop in a' nights, about 9 
or 10 o'clock — cold bread-and-cheese time — just in 
the wishing time of the night, when you wish for 
somebody to come in, without a distinct idea of a 
probable anybody. Just in the nick, neither too early 
to be tedious, nor too late to sit a reasonable time. 
He is a most pleasant hand; a fine, rattling fellow, 
has gone through life laughing at solemn apes; 
himself hugely literate, oppressively full of infor- 
mation in all stuff of conversation, from matter-of- 
fact to Xenophon and Plato — can talk Greek with 



LIFE 21 

Porson, politics with Thelwall, conjecture with 
George Dyer, nonsense with me, and anything with 
anybody; a great farmer, somewhat concerned in an 
agricultural magazine — reads no poetry but Shaks- 
pere, very intimate with Southey, but never reads 
his poetry; relishes George Dyer, thoroughly pene- 
trates into the ridiculous wherever found, under- 
stands the first time (a great desideratum in common 
mind*) — you need never speak twice to him; does 
not want explanations, translations, limitations, as 
Professor Godwin does when you make an asser- 
tion; up to anything, down to everything — whatever 
sapit hominem. A perfect man. All this farrago, 
which must perplex you to read, and has put me to 
a little trouble to select! only proves how impossible 
it is to describe a pleasant hand. You must see Rick- 
man to know him, for he is a species in one. A new 
class. An exotic, any slip of which I am proud to 
put in my garden spot. The clearest-headed fellow. 
Fullest of matter with least verbosity." 

That is just the sort of fellow Lamb liked and was 
always looking for, and very often finding. In his 
modest chambers with his sister Mary as uncon- 
ventional hostess, he gathered these about him, and 
probably enjoyed life as much as any man who ever 
lived. 

The "Convivial Cup." 

Of course, in those days, the "convivial cup" was 
ever present when friends were gathered together, 
and under the influence of it Lamb bubbled over with 
his choicest humor. It has been hinted that the cup 



22 LAMB 

was Lamb's single weakness. On this point Talfourd 
says, "Will anyone, acquainted with these secret 
passages of Lamb's history, wonder that, with a 
strong physical inclination for the stimulus and sup- 
port of strong drinks — which man is framed moder- 
ately to rejoice in — he should snatch some wild pleas- 
ure 'between the acts' (as he called it) 'of his dis- 
tressful drama,' and that, still more, during the lone- 
liness of the solitude created by his sister's absences, 
he should obtain the solace of an hour's feverish 
dream? That, notwithstanding that fraility, he per- 
formed the duties of his hard lot with exemplary 
steadiness and discretion is indeed wonderful — es- 
pecially when it is recollected that he had himself 
been visited, when in the dawn of manhood, with 
his sister's malady, the seeds of which were doubt- 
less in his frame. While that original predisposition 
may explain an occasional flightiness of expression 
on serious matters, fruit of some wayward fancy, 
which flitted through his brain, without disturbing 
his constant reason^©!* reaching his heart, and some 
little extravagances oiiitful mirth, how does it 
heighten the moral courage"x^y which the disease 
was controlled and the severest^ ^duties performed ! 
Never, surely, was there a more striking example of 
the power of a virtuous, rather say of a pious, wish 
to conquer the fiery suggestions of latent insanity 
than that presented by Lamb's history. Nervous, 
tremulous, as he seemed — so slight of frame that 
he looked only fit for the most placid fortune — when 
the dismal emergencies which checkered his life 



LIFE 23 

arose, he acted with as much promptitude and vigour 
as if he had never penned a stanza nor taken a glass 
too much, or was strung with herculean sinews." 

A Clerk All His Life. 

Lamb was a clerk at the East India House for 
thirty-three years. The first three years, beginning 
in 1792, he was on probation and received no sal- 
ary. In 1795 he began to get a salary of forty 
pounds a year, which was increased the next year 
to seventy pounds, and rose steadily till, when he 
retired, he was getting seven hundred and thirty 
pounds a year. He was then retired on a pension 
of four hundred and fifty pounds a year, which -he 
received until his death. Any bookkeeper in these 
days even who received as much would be thought 
fortunate. As far as money was concerned, Lamb 
lived in moderate comfort all his life. 

No mention has been made of Lamb's literary 
work. The fact is, he obtained no real success till 
he was forty-five, and in 1820 began the essays of 
Elia in the London Magazine. Yet all his life he 
had been an aspiring unsuccessful author, trying 
poetry first under the influence of Coleridge and 
having some of his verses published in a volume with 
Coleridge in 1796. In 1798, after the death of his 
mother and also of his Aunt Hetty, Lamb wrote 
the one poem which is today a household word, 
"The Old Familiar Faces." In their original form 
the verses ran thus: 



24 LAMB 

THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES. 

Where are they gone, the old familiar faces? 
I had a mother, but she died, and left me, 
Died prematurely in a day of horrors — 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

I have had playmates, I have had companions, 

In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days — 

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

I have been laughing, I have been carousing, 
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies — 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

I loved a love, once, fairest among women, 
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her — 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man. 
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly; 
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces. 

Ghost-like I paced 'round the haunts of my childhood, 
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse, 
Seeking to find the old familiar faces. 

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother's, 
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling? 
So might we talk of the old familiar faces? 

For some they have died, and some they have left me, 
And some are taken from me; all are departed; 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 



LIFE 25 

When the poem was reprinted in 1818 Lamb 
omitted the first stanza, no doubt to avoid paining 
his sister. The friend of the fifth stanza is Charles 
Lloyd, some of whose verses are published with 
Lamb's in Coleridge's volume, and who occasioned 
an estrangement between Lamb and Coleridge, and 
finally went out of the lives of both. The friend m 
the seventh stanza is Coleridge himself. The itali- 
cized words in the last stanza refer to Mary Lamb's 
sequestration at the asylum. One other beautiful 
poem he wrote when past fifty, "On an Infant Dy- 
ing as Soon as Born." 

Literary Ambitions. 

In 1898 he wrote a novel, Rosamund Gray. It was 
a simple story, into which Lamb introduced himself 
and many of his friends, and it has "a very distinct 
and interesting strain of eeriness." Had it not been 
for the later essays the book would be quite forgot- 
ten in our day, however. In the same year, 1798, 
Lamb had been writing a tragedy entitled John 
Woodvil. In 1800 we find him trying to get John 
Philip Kemble to put the piece on the stage, but 
in vain, and in 1802 he had it published in book 
form. The critics did not receive it at all kindly. 

In 1801 we find Lamb writing paragraphs for a 
poor, struggling, anti-ministerial political paper— "an 
outcast from politer bread," he says, "we attached 
our small talents to the forlorn fortunes of our 
friend. Our occupation was now to write treason." 

The same year Lamb tried to write paragraphs for 
the Morning Chronicle, to add something to his in- 



26 LAMB 

come, but most of his work was rejected. And then 
he tried the Morning Post, whose editor, Stuart, 
was a friend of Coleridge. "But as for poor Charles 
Lamb," says Stuart, writing many years later of 
Coleridge's contributions to the morning Post, "I 
never could make anything of him." His contribu- 
tions consisted for the most part of very short hu- 
morous personal paragraphs, such as today we find 
on the editorial pages of most of our newspapers. 
Their strong points seems to be the italicizing of 
three or four words in each paragraph. He de- 
scribes his work in his Elia essay on ' "Newspapers," 
in which he says he received sixpence a joke. In 
1805 he had lost this work, and did not again return 
to it. 

In the later years he wrote some verses for chil- 
dren, which were published in a very small illus- 
trated volume, by William Godwin, who was trying 
to add to his income by bringing out juvenile books 
(his own and such others as he could obtain). The 
next year, however, Mary Lamb prepared for Godwin 
six "Tales from Shakespeare," and Charles Lamb 
himself did others. In a letter to Manning he says 
the work is to bring in sixty guineas. In a letter to 
her friend, Sarah Stoddart, Mary Lamb writes : 
"Charles has written Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, 
and has begun Hamlet; you would like to see us, 
as we often sit writing at one table (but not on one 
cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in Mid- 
summer Night's Dream; or rather, like an old liter- 
ary Darby and Joan; I taking snuff, and he groan- 
ing all the while, and saying he can make nothing of 



LIFE 27 

it, which he always says till he has finished, and then 
he finds out that he has made something of it. 
. . . . Charles smokes still, and will smoke to the 
end of the chapter." 

These Tales from Shakespeare are more popular 
today than they ever were, and are no more likely to 
be forgotten than "The Old Familiar Faces." The 
brother and sister collaborated on a series of stories 
for children publisher as Mrs. Leicester's School, but 
Mary Lamb wrote all but three. Charles was busy 
editing a volume of "Specimens of English Dramatic 
Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare." 
Lamb also wrote and published a story for children 
entitled Adventures of Ulysses, but it was not as 
popular as the other children's volumes. In 1809 
appeared a volume of Poetry for Children, and in 
1811 Prince Dorus, a fairy tale. 

In 1810 a quarterly was projected by Leigh Hunt, 
and Lamb contributed to it some of his first essays. 
His criticisms of Hogarth and of Shakspere's 
tragedies were never surpassed. Yet he had not 
found himself. The ReUector went "out of existence 
with its fourth number. 

Lamb was determined to be a dramatic author and 
finally a farce entitled "Mr. H." (it turns on the un- 
pleasant name of the principal character, which was 
"Hogflesh") was actually put on the stage. A 
friendly company of clerks came from the East India 
House, and another from the South-Sea House, 
but it would not do. It was heartily condemned 
and Lamb himself, we are told, joined in the 
hisses as cordially as any — he said later because he 



28 LAMB 

was so damnably afraid of being taken for the 
author. This ended his ambitions as a playwright. 

Nothing else of importance was produced until 
1818, when Lamb brought out his collected "Works," 
thinking his literary career was ended. As a matter 
of fact, the work by which alone he is known had 
not even been thought of. 

The Origin of Elia. 

The London Magazine was started in 1820, and 
Lamb was asked for a contribution. He wrote "Rec- 
ollections of the South-Sea House," where he had 
been a clerk for a few months eighteen years before, 
but with which he was no doubt familiar through 
his brother's engagement there for many years. Says 
Lamb in a letter to Taylor, who published the maga- 
zine, "Having a brother now there (at the South- 
Sea House), and doubting how he might relish cer- 
tain descriptions of it, I clapt down the name of Elia 
to it, which passed off pretty well, for Elia himself 
added the functions of an author t@ that of a scrive- 
ner, like myself." Elia was the name of a clerk at 
the South- Sea House when Lamb was there, and in 
a letter to Taylor he adds, "I went the other day 
(not having seen him [Elia] for a year) to laugh over 
with him at my usurpation of his name, and found 
him, alas ! no more than a name, for he had died of 
consumption eleven months ago, and I knew not of 
it. So the name had fairly devolved on me, I think; 
and 'tis all he has left me." It is said all trace of 
the original Elia and his writings has disappeared. 

Mr. Lucas thinks the "comparative thinness of 



LIFE 29 

Lamb's pre-Elian writings and the Elian richness 
and colour" may be accounted for by the very fact 
that Lamb was constitutionally unable to do his best 
except affecting to be some one else. "The innocent 
imposture confers courage, disarms diffidence." Says 
Barry Cornwall, "He was himself eminently modest; 
he never put himself forward; he was always sought. 
He had* much to say on many subjects, and he was 
repeatedly pressed to say this before he consented 
to do so. He was almost teased into writing the 
Elia essays." He was paid two or three times as 
much as the other authors, yet in two years he had 
been paid less than a thousand dollars. 

What Elia is to Literature. 

The Essays of Elia are nearly all simple descrip- 
tions of Lamb himself and his friends and the scenes 
he was familiar with. They were very little influ- 
enced by anything before their time, and they have 
never since been successfully imitated. "Their 'facts' 
are not of the utilitarian order; their humour leads 
rarely to loud laughter; rather to the quiet smile; 
they are not stories, they are not poems; they are 
not difficult enough to suggest 'mental improvement' 
to those who count it loss unless they are puzzled, 
nor simple enough for those who demand of their 
authors no confounded nonsense. 

"At the same time, English literature has nothing 
that in its way is better than Elia's best. The blend 
of sanity, sweet reasonableness, tender fancy, high 
imagination, sympathetic understanding of human na- 
ture, and humour, now wistful, now frolicsome, with 



30 LAMB 

literary skill of unsurpassed delicacy, make Elia 
unique. . . . 

"But why is Elia so treasured a volume. . . . Be- 
cause Elia describes with so much sympathy most of 
the normal feelings of mankind, because Lamb un- 
derstands so much, and is so cheering to the lowly, 
so companionable to the luckless. He is always on 
the side of those who need a friend. He is 'in love 
with the green earth/ he never soars out of reach, 
never withholds his tolerance for our weaknesses." 

Swinburne says, "No good criticism of Lamb, 
strictly speaking, can ever be written ; because no- 
body can do justice to his work who does not love 
it too well to feel himself capable of giving judgment 
upon it. . . . The truth is simple and indisputable 
that no labour could be at once so delightful and so 
useless, so attractive and so vain, as the task of 
writing in praise of Lamb. Any man or any child 
who can feel anything of his charm utters better 
praise of him in silence than any array of epithets 
or periods could give. Any man or any woman who 
can feel nothing of his charm is outside the pale of 
any possible influence or impression from any rea- 
soning or any enthusiasm of others." 

Lamb has described himself so well in his own 
essays, notably "New Year's Eve," "Imperfect Sym- 
pathies," and the "Character of the Late Elia," that 
it seems foolish to waste our time upon the words of 
others. 

Writing to John Taylor, editor of the London 
Magazine, Lamb says of himself, "Poor Elia does 
not pretend to so very clear revelations of a future 



LIFE 31 

state of being as Olen seems gifted with. He stum- 
bles about dark mountains at best; but he knows at 
least how to be thankful for this life, and is too 
thankful indeed for certain relationships lent him 
here, not to tremble for a possible resumption of 
the gift. He is too apt to express himself lightly, 
and cannot be sorry for the present occasion, as it 
has called forth a reproof so Christian-like." This 
was apropos of a poem published in the London 
Magazine in which Charles Abraham Elton, signing 
himself "Olen," reasoned gently but firmly with 
Elia's unhappy skepticism — "it set up a cheerful 
Christian certainty in place of Lamb's wistful hesi- 
tancies," and finally offered him a blissful picture of 
union with his "Alice" in heaven if he was good. 
Elsewhere Lamb says, "I am in love with this green 
earth." His religious creed was that it was best 
to be thankful for this life and make the most of it, 
whatever may be beyond. 

The last years of Lamb's life were made happy by 
a young girl whom he and Mary adopted in 1823. 
She was Emma Isola, granddaughter of Agostino 
Isola, a teacher of Italian at Cambridge. The Lambs 
first saw the little girl on a visit to Cambridge in 
1820. She was eleven years old and motherless. In 
the following January she went to visit them, and 
when her father died they adopted her. She mar- 
ried Edward Moxon, the publisher, in 1833. Lamb 
in a letter describing the wedding says, "I tripped 
a little at the altar, was engaged in admiring the 
altar-piece, but, recalled seasonably by a Parsonic 



32 LAMB 

rebuke, 'Who gives this woman!' was in time to re- 
ply resolutely, 'I do.' " 

At the end of 1822 he tired of Elia and attempted 
to kill off the character, but it was revived and 
more Elia essays were written. The contributions 
to the London Magazine continued until 1825. The 
first volume of Essays of Elia was published in 
1823. Ten years later was published Last Essays of 
Elia, and in the following year, December 27, 1834, 
Lamb died. Mary Lamb lived eleven years longer. 
She received one hundred and twenty pounds a year 
pension from the East India House Clerks' Fund, 
and Lamb left two thousand pounds. 



ESSAYS OF EUA 

THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER 
TEMPLE. 

I was born, and passed the first seven years of my 
life, in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gar- 
dens, its fountains, its river, I had almost said — 
for in those young years, what was this king of 
rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleas- 
ant places? these are of my oldest recollection. I 
repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more fre- 
quently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of 
Spenser, where he speaks of this spot: 

There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, 
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride. 
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers. 
There whylome wont the Templar knights to bide, 
Till they decayed through pride. 

Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metrop- 
olis. What a transition for a countryman visiting 
London for the first time — the passing from the 
crowded Strand or Fleet street, by unexpected ave- 
nues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic 
green recesses ! What a cheerful, liberal look hath 
that portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks 
the greater garden ; that goodly pile 



84 LAMB 

Of building strong, albeit of paper height, 

confronting with massy contrast, the lighter, older, 
more fantastically-shrouded one, named of Harcourt, 
with the cheerful Crown-Office-row (place of my 
kindly engendure), right opposite the stately stream; 
which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely 
trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned 
from her Twickenham Naiades ! a man would give 
something to have been born in such places. What 
a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, 
where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise 
and fall, how many times, to the astoundment of the 
young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not being 
able to guess at its recondite machinery, were al- 
most tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic. 
What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun- 
dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals 
with that Time which they measured, and to take 
their revelations of its flight immediately from 
heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain 
of light. How would the dark line steal impercep- 
tibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to 
detect its movement, never catched, nice as an 
evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep. 

Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial hand 

Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! 

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous 
embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn 
dullness of communication, compared with the sim- 



THE OLD BENCHERS 35 

pie, altar-like structure and silent heart-language of 
the old dial! It stood as the garden god of Chris- 
tian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished ? 
If its business use be superseded by more elaborate 
inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have 
pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate 
labours, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of 
temperance and good hours. It was the primitive 
clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could 
scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the meas- 
ure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring 
by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings 
by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The 
shepherd "carved it out quaintly in the sun"; and, 
turning philosopher by the very occupation, provided 
it with mottoes more touching than tombstones. It 
was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by 
Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, 
made a dial out of herbs and flowers. I must quote 
his verses a little higher up, for they are full, as all 
his serious poetry was, of witty delicacy. They will 
not come in awkwardly, I hope, in a talk of foun- 
tains and sun-dials. He is speaking of sweet garden 
scenes : 

What wondrous life is this I lead! 
Ripe apples drop about my head. 
The luscious clusters of the vine 
Upon my mouth do crush their wine. 
The nectarine, and curious peach, 
Into my hands themselves do reach. 
Stumbling on melons as I pass, 
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. 



36 LAMB 

Meanwhile the mind from pleasures less 

Withdraws into its happiness. 

The mind, that ocean, where each kind 

Does straight its own resemblance find; 

Yet it creates, transcending these, 

Far other worlds and other seas ; 

Annihilating all that's made 

To a green thought in a green shade. 

Here at the fountain's sliding foot 

Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, 

Casting the body's vest aside, 

My soul into the boughs does glide; 

There, like a bird, it sits and sings, 

Then whets and claps its silver wings, 

And, till prepared for longer flight, 

Waves in its plumes the various light. 

How well the skillful gardener drew 

Of flowers and herbs, this dial new, 

Where, from above, the milder sun 

Does through a fragrant zodiac run: 

And, as it works, the industrious bee 

Computes its time as well as we. 

How could such sweet and wholesome hours 

Be reckoned, but with herbs and flowers?* 

The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in 
like manner, fast vanishing. Most of them are dried 
up or bricked over. Yet, where one is left, as in 
that little green nook behind the South-Sea House, 
what a freshness it gives to the dreary pile. Four 
little winged marble boys used to play their virgin 



'From a copy of verses entitled "The Garden." 



THE OLD BENCHERS 37 

fancies, spouting out ever fresh streams from their 
innocent-wanton lips in the square of Lincoln's Inn, 
when I was no bigger than they were figured. They 
are gone and the spring choked up. The fashion, 
they tell me, is gone by, and these things are 
esteemed childish. Why not, then, gratify children, 
by letting them stand? Lawyers, I suppose, were 
children once. They are awakening images to them 
at least. Why must everything smack of man and 
mannish? Is the world all grown up? Is childhood 
dead? Or is there not in the bosoms of the wisest 
and the best some of the child's heart left to respond 
to its earliest enchantments? The figures were gro- 
tesque. Are the stiff-wigged living figures, that still 
flitter and chatter about that area, less Gothic in 
appearance? or is the splutter of their hot rhetoric 
one-half so refreshing and innocent as the little 
cool, playful streams those exploded cherubs ut- 
tered? 

They have lately gothicized the - entrance to the 
Inner Temple-hall, and the library front; to assim- 
ilate them, I suppose, to the body of the hall, which 
they do not at all resemble. What is become of the 
winged horse that stood over the former? a stately 
arms ! and who has removed those frescoes of the 
Virtues, which Italianized the end of the Paper- 
buildings? my first hint of allegory! They must 
account to me for these things, which I miss so 
greatly. 

The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call 
the parade ; but the traces are passed away of the 
footsteps which made its pavement awful! It is 



38 LAMB 

become common and profane. The old benchers had 
it almost sacred to themselves, in the fore part of 
the day at least. They might not be sided or jostled. 
Their air and dress asserted the parade. You left 
wide spaces betwixt you when you passed them. We 
walk on even terms with their successors. The 
roguish eye of J — 11, ever ready to be delivered of a 
jest, almost invites a stranger to vie a repartee with 
it. But what insolent familiar durst have mated 
Thomas Coventry? whose person was a quadrate, 
his step massy and elephantine, his face square as 
the lion's, his gait peremptory and path-keeping, in- 
divertible from his way as a moving column, the 
scarecrow of his inferiors, the browbeater of equals 
and superiors, who made a solitude of children 
wherever he came, for they fled his insufferable 
presence, as they would have shunned an Elisha 
bear. His growl was as thunder in their ears, 
whether he spake to them in mirth or in rebuke; 
his invitatory notes being, indeed, of all, the most 
repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff, aggravating 
the natural terrors of his speech, broke from each 
majestic nostril, darkening the air. He took it, not 
by pinches, but a palmful at once, diving for it un- 
der the mighty flaps of his old-fashioned waistcoat 
pocket; his waistcoat red and angry, his coat dark 
rappee, tinctured by dye original, and by adjuncts, 
with buttons of absolute gold. And so he paced the 
terrace. 

By his side a milder form was sometimes to be 
seen; the pensive gentility of Samuel Salt. They 
were coevals, and had nothing but that and their 



THE OLD BENCHERS 39 

benchership in common. In politics Salt was a whig, 
and Coventry a staunch tory. Many a sarcastic 
growl did the latter cast out — for Coventry had a 
rough spinous humor — at the political confederates 
of his associate, which rebounded from the gentle 
bosom- of the latter like cannon-balls from wool. You 
could not ruffle Samuel Salt. 

S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, 
and of excellent discernment in the chamber prac- 
tice of the law. I suspect his knowledge did not 
amount to much. When a case of difficult disposi- 
tion of money, testamentary or otherwise, came be- 
fore him, he ordinarily handed it over, with a few 
instructions, to his man Lovel, who was a quick little 
fellow, and would despatch it out of hand by the 
light of natural understanding, of which he had an 
uncommon share. It was incredible what repute for 
talents S. enjoyed by the mere trick of gravity. He 
was a shy man ; a child might pose him in a minute 
— indolent and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet 
men would give him credit for vast application, in 
spite of himself. He was not to be trusted with 
himself with impunity. He never dressed for a din- 
ner party but he forgot his sword — they wore swords 
then — or some other necessary part of his equipage. 
Lovel had his eye upon him on all these occasions, 
and ordinarily gave him his cue. If there was any- 
thing which he could speak unseasonably, he was 
sure to do it. He was to dine at a relative's of the 
unfortunate Miss Blandy on the day of her exe- 
cution; and L., who had a wary foresight of his 
probable hallucinations, before he set out schooled 



40 LAM3 

him, with great anxiety, not in any possible manner 
to allude to her story that day. S. promised faith- 
fully to observe the injunction. He had not been 
seated in the parlour, where the company was ex- 
pecting the dinner summons, four minutes, when, a 
pause in the conversation ensuing, he got up, looked 
out of the window, and pulling down his ruffles — 
an ordinary motion with him — observed, "it was a 
gloomy day," and added, "Miss Blandy must be 
hanged by this time, I suppose." Instances of this 
sort were perpetual. Yet S. was thought by some 
of the greatest men of his time a fit person to be 
consulted, not alone in matters pertaining to the 
law, but in the ordinary niceties and embarrassments 
of conduct — from force of manner entirely. He 
never laughed. He had the same good fortune among 
the female world — was a known toast with the ladies, 
and one or two are said to have died for love of 
him — I suppose, because he never trifled or talked 
gallantly with them, or paid them, indeed, hardly 
common attentions. He had a fine face and person, 
but wanted, methought, the spirit that should have 
shown them off with advantage to the women. His 

eye lacked luster. Not so, thought Susan P ; 

who, at the advanced age of sixty, was seen, in the 
cold evening time, unaccompanied, wetting the pave- 
ment of B d Row with tears that fell in drops 

which might be heard, because her friend had died 
that day — he, whom she had pursued with a hope- 
less passion for the last forty years — a passion which 
years could not extinguish or abate; nor the long- 
resolved, yet gently-enforced, puttings off of unre- 



THE OLD BENCHERS 41 

lenting bachelorhood dissuade from its cherished pur- 
pose. Mild Susan P , thou hast now thy friend 

in heaven ! 

Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble family 
of that name. He passed his youth in contracted 
circumstances, which gave him early those parsi- 
monious habits which in after life never forsook 
him; so that with one windfall or another, about the 
time I knew him, he was master of four or five 
hundred thousand pounds ; nor did he look or walk 
worth a moidore less. He lived in a gloomy house 
opposite the pump in Serjeant's-inn, Fleet street. 
J., the counsel, is doing self-imposed penance in it, 
for what reason I divine not, at this day. C. had an 
agreeable seat at North Cray, where he seldom spent 
above a day or two at a time in the summer ; but 
preferred, during the hot months, standing at his 
window in this damp, close, well-like mansion, to 
watch, as he said, "the maids drawing water all day 
long." I suspect he had his within-door reasons for 
the preference. Hie currus ei arma fuere. He might 
think his treasures more safe. His house had the 
aspect of a strong box. C. was a close hunks — a 
hoarder rather than a miser — or, if a miser, none of 
the mad Elwes breed, who have brought discredit 
upon a character which cannot exist without cer- 
tain admirable points of steadiness and unity of pur- 
pose. One may hate a true miser, but cannot, I 
suspect, so easily despise him. By taking care of the 
pence he is often enabled to part with the pounds, 
upon a scale that leaves us careless, generous fellows 
halting at an immeasurable distance behind. C. gave 



42 LAMB 

ftway i30,000 at once in his lifetime to a blind char- 
ity. His housekeeping was severely looked after, but 
he kept the table of a gentleman. He would know 
who came in and who went out of his house, but 
his kitchen chimney was never suffered to freeze. 

Salt was his opposite in this, as in all — never 
knew what he was worth in the world; and having 
but a competency for his rank, which his indolent 
kabits were little calculated to improve, might have 
suffered severely if he had not had honest people 
about him. Lovel took care of everything. He was 
at once his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his 
friend, his "flapper," his guide, stop-watch, auditor, 
treasurer. He did nothing without consulting Lovel, 
or failed in anything without expecting and fearing 
his admonishing. He put himself almost too much 
in his hands, had they not been the purest in the 
world. He resigned his title almost to respect as a 
master, if L. could ever have forgotten for a mo- 
ment that he was a servant. 

I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incor- 
rigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal, 
and "would strike." In the cause of the oppressed 
he never considered inequalities, or calculated the 
number of his opponents. He once wrested a sword 
out of the hand of a man of quality that had drawn 
upon him, and pommeled him severely with the hilt 
of it. The swordsman had offered insult to a fe- 
male — an occasion upon which no odds against him 
could have prevented the interference of Lovel. He 
would stand next day bareheaded to the same per- 
son modestly to excuse his interference — for L. never 



THE OLD BENCHERS 43 

forgot rank where something better was not con- 
cerned. L. was the liveliest little fellow breathing, 
had a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said 
greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him which 
confirms it), possessed a fine turn for humorous 
poetry — next to Swift and Prior — molded heads in 
clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of 
natural genius merely; turned cribbage boards, and 
such small cabinet toys, to perfection; took a hand 
at quadrille or bowls with equal facility ; made punch 
better than any man of his degree in England; had 
the merriest quips and conceits; and was altogether 
as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could 
desire. He was a brother of the angle, moreover, 
and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as 
Mr. Izaak Walton would have chosen to go a-fishing 
with. I saw him in his old age and the decay of 
his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage of 
human weakness — "a remnant most "forlorn of what 
he was" — yet even then his eye would light up upon 
the mention of favorite Garrick. He was greatest, 
he would say, in Bayes — "was upon the stage nearly 
throughout the whole performance, and as busy as a 
bee." At intervals, too, he would speak of his former 
life, and how he came up a little boy from Lincoln, 
to go to service, and how his mother cried at parting 
with him, and how he returned, after some few years' 
absence, in his smart new livery, to see her, and she 
blest herself at the change, and could hardly be 
brought to believe that it was "her own bairn." And 
then, the excitement subsiding, he would weep, till 
I have wished that sad second-childhood might have 



44 LAMB 

a mother still to lay its head upon her lap. But the 
common mother of us all in no long time after re- 
ceived him gently into hers. 

With Coventry and with Salt, in their walks upon 
the terrace, most commonly Peter Pierson would join 
to make up a third. They did not walk linked arm- 
in-arm in those days — "as now our stout triumvirs 
sweep the streets" — but generally with both hands 
folded behind them for state, or with one at least 
behind the other carrying a cane. P. was a benev- 
olent, but not a prepossessing man. He had that in 
his face which you could not term unhappiness ; it 
rather implied an incapacity of being happy. His 
cheeks were colorless, even to whiteness. His look 
was uninviting, resembling (but without his sour- 
ness) that of our great philanthropist. I know that 
he did good acts, but I could never make out what 
he was. Contemporary with these, but subordinate, 
was Daines Barrington — another oddity — he walked 
burly and square, in imitation, I think, of Coventry 
— howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his pro- 
totype. Nevertheless, he did pretty well, upon the 
strength of being a tolerable antiquarian, and having 
a brother a bishop. When the account of his year's 
treasurership came to be audited, the following sin- 
gular charge was unanimously disallowed by the 
bench : "Item, disbursed Mr. Allen, the gardener, 
twenty shillings for stuff to poison the sparrows, by 
my orders." Next to him was old Barton, a jolly 
negation, who took upon him the ordering of the 
bills of fare for the parliament chamber, where the 
benchers dine — answering to the combination rooms 



THE OLD BENCHERS 45 

at College — much to the easement of his less epi- 
curean brethren. I know nothing more of him. Then 
Read, and Twopenny — Reed good-humoured and per- 
sonable — Twopenny, good-humoured, but thin, and fe- 
licitous in jests upon his own figure. If T. was thin, 
Wharry was attenuated and fleeting. Many must 
member him (for he was rather of later date) and 
his singular gait, which was performed by three steps 
and a jump regularly succeeding. The steps were 
little efforts, like that of a child beginning to walk; 
the jump comparatively vigorous, as a foot to an 
inch. Where he learned this figure, or what occa- 
sioned it, I could never discover. It was neither 
graceful in itself, nor seemed to answer the purpose 
any better than common walking. The extreme 
tenuity of his frame, I suspect, set him upon it. It 
was a trial of poising. Twopenny would often rally 
him upon his leanness, and hail him as Brother 
Lusty; but W. had no relish of a joke. His features 
were spiteful. I have heard that he would pinch his 
cat's ears extremely when anything had offended 
him. Jackson — the omniscient Jackson, he was called 
— was of this period. He had the reputation of pos- 
sessing more multifarous knowledge than any man 
of his time. He was the Friar Bacon of the less 
literate portion of the Temple. I remember a pleas- 
ant passage of the cook applying to him, with much 
formality of apology, for instructions how to write 
down edge bone of beef in his bill of commons. He 
was supposed to know, if any man in the world did. 
He decided the orthography to be — as I have given 
it — fortifying his authority with such anatomical rea- 



46 LAMB 

sons as dismissed the manciple (for the time) learned 
and happy. Some do spell it yet, perversely, aitch 
bone, from a fanciful resemblance between its shape 
and that of the aspirate so denominated. I had al- 
most forgotten Mingay with the iron hand — but he 
was somewhat later. He had lost his right hand by 
some accident, and supplied it with a grappling-hook, 
which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. I de- 
tected the substitute before I was old enough to 
reason whether it were artificial or not. I remember 
the astonishment it raised in me. He was a blus- 
tering, loud-talking person ; and I reconciled the phe- 
nomenon to my ideas as an emblem of power — 
somewhat like the horns in the forehead of Michael 
Angelo's Moses. Baron Maseres, who walks (or did 
till very lately) in the costume of the reign of George 
the Second, closes my imperfect recollections of the 
old bachelors of the Inner Temple. 

Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled? Or, if the 
like of you exist, why exist they no more for me? 
Ye inexplicable, half-understood appearances, why 
comes in reason to tear away the preternatural mist, 
bright or gloomy, that enshrouded you? Why make 
ye so sorry a figure in my relation, who made up to 
me — to my childish eyes — the mythology of the Tem- 
ple? In those days I saw Gods, as "old men cov- 
ered with a mantle," walking upon the earth. Let 
the dreams of classic idolatry perish — extinct be the 
fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary fabling, in 
the heart of childhood there will, forever, spring up 
a well of innocent or wholesome superstition — the 
seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital 



THE OLD BENCHERS 47 

< — from every-day forms educing the unknown and 
the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will be 
light when the grown world flounders about in the 
darkness of sense and materiality. While childhood, 
and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, 
imagination shall not have spread her holy wings 
totally to fly the earth. 

P. S. — I have done injustice to the soft shade of 
Samuel Salt. See what it is to trust to imperfect 
memory, and the erring notices of childhood! Yet 
I protest that I always thought that he had been a 
bachelor! This gentleman, R. N. informs me, mar- 
ried young, and losing his lady in childbed, within 
the first year of their union, fell into a deep melan- 
choly, from the effects of which, probably, he never 
thoroughly recovered. In what a new light does 
this place his rejection (O call it by a gentler 

name!) of mild Susan P , unravelling into beauty 

certain peculiarities of this very shy and retiring 
character! Henceforth let no one receive the nar- 
ratives of Elia for true records! They are, in 
truth, but shadows of fact — versimilitudes, not veri- 
ties — or sitting but upon the remote edges and out- 
skirts of history. He is no such honest chronicler 
as R. N. and would have done better perhaps to 
have consulted that gentleman before he sent these 
incondite reminiscences to press. But the worthy 
sub-treasurer — who respects his old and his new 
masters — would but have been puzzled at the in- 
decorous liberties of Elia. The good man wots not, 
peradventure, of the license which Magazines have 
arrived at in this plain-speaking age, or hardly 



48 LAMB 

dreams of their existence beyond the Gentleman's 
— his furthest monthly excursions in this nature 
having been long confined to the holy ground of 
honest Urban 's obituary. May it be long before his 
own name shall help to swell those columns of un- 
envied flattery. Meantime, O ye New Benchers of 
the Inner Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is 
himself the kindliest of human creatures. Should 
infirmity overtake him — he is yet in green and vig- 
orous senility — make allowances for them, remem- 
bering that "ye yourselves are old." So may the 
Winged Horse, your ancient badge and cognizance, 
still flourish; So may future Hookers and Seldens 
illustrate your church and chambers! So may the 
sparrows, in default of more melodious quiristers, 
unpoisoned hop about your walks ! So may the 
fresh-colored and cleanly nursery-maid, who, by 
leave, airs her playful charge in your stately gar- 
dens, drop her prettiest blushing courtesy as ye 
pass, reductive of juvenescent emotion! So may 
the younkers of this generation eye you, pacing 
your stately terrace, with the same superstitious 
veneration with which the child Elia gazed on the 
Old Worthies that solemnized the parade before ye! 



DREAM CHILDREN 49 



DREAM CHILDREN; A REVERIE. 

Children love to listen to stories about their elders, 
when they were children; to stretch their imagina- 
tion to the conception of a traditionary great-uncle, 
or grandame, whom they never saw. It was in this 
spirit that my little ones crept about me the other 
evening to hear about their great-grandmother Field, 
who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a hundred 
times bigger than that in which they and papa lived) 
which had been the scene — so at least it was gener- 
ally believed in that part of the country — of the 
tragic incidents which they had lately become fa- 
miliar with from the ballad of the Children in the 
Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the 
children and their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly 
carved out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the 
great hall, the whole story down to the Robin Red- 
breasts ; till a foolish rich person pulled it down to 
set up a marble one of modern invention in its stead, 
with no story upon it. Here Alice put out one of 
her dear mother's looks, too tender to be called up- 
braiding. Then I went on to say, how religious and 
how good their great-grandmother Field was, how 
beloved and respected by everybody, though she was 
not indeed the mistress of this great house, but had 
only charge of it and yet in some respects she might 
be said to be mistress of it too) committed to her by 
the owner, who preferred living in a newer and 
more fashionable mansion which he had purchased 



50 LAMB 

somewhere in the adjoining county; but still she 
lived in it in a manner as if it had been her own, and 
kept up the dignity of the great house in a sort while 
she lived, which afterward came to decay and was 
nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments 
stripped and carried away to the owner's other house, 
where they were set up, and looked as awkward as if 
some one were to carry away the old tombs they 
had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick them up in 
Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John 
smiled, as much as to say, "that would be foolish 
indeed." And then I told how, when she came to 
die, her funeral was attended by a concourse of all 
the poor, and some of the gentry too, of the neigh- 
bourhood for miles round to show their respect for 
her memory, because she had been such a good and 
religious woman; so good indeed that she knew all 
the Psaltery by heart, ay, and a great part of the 
Testament besides. Here little Alice spread her 
hands. Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful 
person their great-grandmother Field once was; and 
how in her youth she was esteemed the best dancer — 
here Alice's little right foot played an involuntary 
movement, till, upon my looking grave, it desisted — 
the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a 
cruel disease, called a cancer, came, and bowed her 
down with pain; but it could never bend her good 
spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still up- 
right, because she was so good and religious. Then 
I told how she was used to sleep by herself in a lone 
chamber of the great lone house ; and how she believed 
that an apparition of two infants was to be seen 



DREAM CHILDREN 51 

at midnight gliding up and down the great stair- 
case near where she slept, but she said "those inno- 
cents would do her no harm;" and how frightened 
I used to be, though in those days I had my maid 
to sleef) with me, because I was never half so good 
or religious as she — and yet I never saw the infants. 
Here John expanded all his eyebrows and tried to 
look courageous. Then I told how good she was 
to all her grandchildren, having us to the great house 
in the holy-days, where I in particular used to spend 
many hours by myself in gazing upon the old busts 
of the twelve Caesars, that had been Emperors of 
Rome, till the old marble heads would seem to live 
again, or I to be turned into marble with them; how 
I never could be tired with roaming about the huge 
mansion, with its vast empty rooms, with their worn- 
out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken 
panels, with the gilding almost rubbed out — some- 
times in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I 
had almost to myself, unless when now and then a 
solitary gardening man would cross me — and how 
the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, 
without my ever offering to pluck them, because they 
were forbidden fruit, unless now and then — and be- 
cause I had more pleasure in strolling about the old 
melancholy-looking yew-trees or the firs, and picking 
up the red berries, and the fir-apples which were 
good for nothing but to look at — or in lying about 
upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden smells 
around me — or basking in the orangery till I could 
almost fancy myself ripening too, along with the 
oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth, 



52 LAMB 

or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in 
the fish-pond, at the bottom of the garden, with 
here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway 
down the water in silent state, as if it mocked at 
their impertinent friskings. I had more pleasure in 
these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet fla- 
vors of peaches, nectarines, oranges and such-like 
common baits of children. Here John slyly de- 
posited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, 
not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated dividing 
with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them 
for the present as irrelevant. Then, in somewhat more 
heightened tone, I told how, though their great- 
grandmother Field loved all her grandchildren, yet 
in an especial manner she might be said to love their 

uncle John L , because he was so handsome and 

spirited a youth, and a king to the rest of us; and 
instead of moping about in solitary corners, like 
some of us, he would mount the most nettlesome 
horse he could get, when but an imp no bigger than 
themselves, and make it carry him half over the 
county in a morning, and join the hunters when 
there were any out — and yet he loved the old great 
house and gardens too, but had too much spirit to 
be always pent up within their boundaries — and how 
their great uncle grew up to man's estate as brave 
as he was handsome, to the admiration of everybody, 
but of their great grandmother Field most especially, 
and how he used to carry me upon his back when I 
was a lame-footed boy — for he was a good bit older 
than me — many a mile when I could not walk for 
pain; and how in after life he became lame- footed 



DREAM CHILDREN 53 

too, and I did not always (I fear) make allowances 
enough for him when he was impatient and in pain, 
nor remember sufficiently how considerate he had 
been to me when I was lame-footed; and how when 
he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it 
seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such 
a distance there is betwixt life and death ; and how 
I bore his death as I thought pretty well at first, 
but afterward it haunted and haunted me; and 
though I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, 
and as I think he would have done if I had died, yet 
I missed him all day long, and knew not till then 
how much I loved him. I missed his kindness, and 
I missed his crossness, and I wished him to be alive 
again, to be quarreling with him (for we quarreled 
sometimes), rather than not have him again, and 
was as uneasy without him, as he, their poor uncle, 
must have been when the doctor took off his limb. 
Here the children fell a-crying, and asked if their 
little mourning which they had on was not for 
Uncle John, and they looked up, and prayed me not 
to go on about their uncle, but to tell them some 
stories about their pretty dead mother. Then I told 
how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, some- 
times in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the 

fair Alice W n; and as much as children could 

understand, I explained to them what coyness, and 
difficulty, and denial, meant in maidens — when sud- 
denly turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice 
looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re- 
presentment, that I became in doubt which of them 
stood there before me, or whose that bright hair 



54 LAMB 

was; and while I stood gazing both the children 
gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and 
still receding, till nothing at last but two mournful 
features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, 
without speech, strangely impressed upon me the 
effects of speech : "We are not of Alice, nor of 
thee, nor are we children at all! The children of 
Alice called Bartrum father. We are nothing, less 
than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might 
have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores 
of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence 
and a name" — and immediately awaking, I found 
myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, 
where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget 
unchanged by my side — but John L. (or James Elia) 
was gone forever. 



MY FIRST PLAY. 

At the north end of Cross-court there yet stands 
a portal, of some architectural pretensions, though 
reduced to humble use, serving at present for an en- 
trance to a printing-office. This old door-way, if 
you are young, reader, you may not know was the 
identical pit entrance to old Drury — Garrick's Drury 
— all of it that is left. I never pass it without shak- 
ing some forty years from off my shoulders, recur- 
ring to the evening when I passed through it to see 
my first play. The afternoon had been wet, and the 
condition of our going (the elder folks and myself) 
was, that the rain should cease. With what a beat- 



MY FIRST PLAY 55 

ing heart did I watch from the window the puddles, 
from the stillness of which I was taught to prog- 
nosticate the desired cessation ! I seem to remember 
the last spurt, and the glee with which I ran to 
announce it. 

We went with orders, which my godfather F. had 
sent us. He kept the oil shop (now Davis') at the 
corner of Featherstone-buildings, in Holborn. F. 
was a tall grave person, lofty in speech, and had 
pretensions above his rank. He associated in those 
days with John Palmer, the comedian, whose gait 
and bearing he seemed to copy; if John (which is 
quite as likely) did not rather borrow somewhat 
of his manner from my godfather. He was also 
known to and visited by Sheridan. It was to his 
house in Holborn that young Brinsley brought his 
first wife on her elopement with him from the board- 
ing school at Bath — the beautiful Maria Linley. My 
parents were present (over a quadrille table) when 
he arrived in the evening with his harmonious 
charge. From either of these connections it may be 
inferred that my godfather could command an order 
for the then Drury-lane Theater at pleasure — and, 
indeed, a pretty liberal issue of those cheap billets, in 
Brinsley's easy autograph, I have heard him say was 
the sole remuneration which he had received for 
many years' nightly illumination of the orchestra 
and various avenues of that theater — and he was 
content it should be so. The honour of Sheridan's 
familiarity — or supposed familiarity — was better to 
my godfather than money. 

F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen; grandilo- 



56 LAMB 

quent, yet courteous. His delivery of the commonest 
matters of fact was Ciceronian. He had two Latin 
words almost constantly in his mouth (how odd 
sounds Latin from an oilman's lips) which my bet- 
ter knowledge since has enabled me to correct. In 
strict pronunciation they should have been sounded 
vice versa, but in those young ears they impressed 
me with more awe than they would now do, read 
aright from Seneca or Varro, in his own peculiar 
pronunciation, monosyllabically elaborated, or An- 
glicised, into something like verse verse. By an im- 
posing manner, and the help of these distorted 
syllables, he climbed (but that was little) to the 
highest parochial honours which St. Andrew's has 
to bestow. 

He is dead — and thus much I thought due to his 
memory, both for my first orders (little wondrous 
talismans ! — slight keys, and insignificant to outward 
sight, but opening to me more than Arabian para- 
dises!) and, moreover, that by his testamentary 
beneficence I came into possession of the only landed 
property which I could ever call my own — situate 
near the road-way village of pleasant Puckeridge, in 
Hertfordshire. When I journeyed down to take pos- 
session, and planted foot on my own ground, the 
stately habits of the donor descended upon me, and 
I strode (shall I confess the vanity?) with larger 
paces over my allotment of three-quarters of an 
acre, with its commodious mansion in the midst, 
with the feeling of an English freeholder that all 
betwixt sky and center was my own. The estate has 



MY FIRST PLAY 57 

passed into more prudent hands, and nothing but 
an agrarian can restore it. 

In those days were pit orders. Beshrew the un- 
comfortable manager who abolished them! with 
one of these we went. I remember the waiting at 
the door — not that which is left — but between that 
and an inner door in shelter — O when shall I be 
such an expectant again, with the cry of nonpareils, 
an indispensable play-house accompaniment in those 
days. As near as I can recollect, the fashionable 
pronunciation of the theatrical fruiteresses then was, 
"Chase some oranges, chase some numparels, chase 
a bill of the play"; chase pro chuse. But when we 
got in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled a 
heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be 
disclosed — the breathless anticipations I endured! 
I had seen something like it in the plate prefixed 
to Troilus and Cressida, in Rowe s Shakespeare — 
the tent scene with Diomede — and a sight of that 
plate can always bring back in a measure the feeling 
of that evening. The boxes at that time, full of well- 
dressed women of quality, projected over the pit; 
and the pilasters reaching down were adorned with 
a glistening substance (I know not what) under 
glass as it seemed), resembling a homely fancy — 
but I judged it to be sugar-candy — yet to my raised 
imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it ap^ 
peared a glorified candy! The orchestra lights at 
length rose, those "fair Auroras !" Once the bell 
sounded. It was to ring out yet once again — and, in- 
capable of the anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in 
a sort of resignation upon the maternal lap. It 



58 LAMB 

rang the second time. The curtain drew up — I was 
not past six years old, and the play was Artaxerxes ! 

I had dabbled a little in the Universal History — 
the ancient part of it — and here was the court of 
Persia. It was being admitted to a sight of the past. 
I took no proper interest in the action going on, 
for I understood not its import — but I heard the 
word Darius, and I was in the midst of Daniel. All 
feeling was absorbed in vision. Gorgeous vests, 
gardens, palaces, princesses, passed before me. I 
knew not players. I was in Persepolis for the time, 
and the burning idol of their devotion almost con- 
verted me into a worshiper. I was awe-struck, and 
believed those significations to be something more 
than elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a 
dream. No such pleasure has since visited me but in 
dreams. Harlequin's invasion followed; where, I 
remember, the transformation of the magistrates 
into reverend beldams seemed to me a piece of grave 
historic justice, and the tailor carrying his own head 
to be as sober a verity as the legend of St. Denys. 

The next play to which I was taken was the Lady 
of the Manor, of which, with the exception of some 
scenery, very faint traces are left in my memory. 
It was followed by a pantomime, called Lun's Ghost 
•—a satiric touch, I apprehend, upon Rich, not long 
since dead — but to my apprehension (too sincere for 
satire), Lun was as remote a piece of antiquity as 
Lud, the father of a line of Harlequins, transmitting 
his dagger of lath (the wooden sceptre) through 
countless ages. I saw the primeval Motley come 
from his silent tomb in a ghastly vest of white 



MY FIRST PLAY 59 

patchwork, like the apparition of a dead rainbow. 
So Harlequins (thought I) look when they are dead. 

My third play followed in quick succession. It 
was the Way of the World. I think I must have sat 
at it as grave as a judge; for I remember the hys- 
teric affectations of good Lady Wishfort affected 
me like some solemn tragic passion. Robinson Cru- 
soe followed; in which Crusoe, man Friday, and the 
parrot, were as good and authentic as in the story. 
The clownery and pantaloonery of these pantomimes 
have clean passed out of my head. I believe I no 
more laughed at them than at the same age I should 
have been disposed to laugh at the grotesque Gothic 
heads (seeming to me then replete with devout 
meaning) that gape and grin in stone around the 
inside of the old Round Church (my church) of the 
Templars. s, 

I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when I was 
from six to seven years old. After the intervention 
of six or seven other years (for at school all play- 
going was inhibited) I again entered the doors of 
a theater. That old Artaxerxes evening had never 
done ringing in my fancy. I expected the same 
feelings to come again with the same occasion. But 
we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen 
than the latter does from six. In that interval what 
had I not lost! At the first period I knew nothing, 
understood nothing, discriminated nothing. I felt 
all, loved all, wondered all — 

Was nourished, I could not tell how — 
I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a 
rationalist. The same things were there materially; 



60 LAMB 

but the emblem, the reference, was gone. The green 
curtain was no longer a veil, drawn between two 
worlds, the unfolding of which was to bring back 
past ages, to present a "royal ghost," but a certain 
quantity of green baize, which was to separate the 
audience for a given time from certain of their 
fellow men who were to come forward and pretend 
those parts. The lights — the orchestra lights — came 
up a clumsy machinery. The first ring, and the sec- 
ond ring, was now but a trick of the prompter's bell, 
which had been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phan- 
tom of a voice, no hand seen or guessed at which 
ministered to its warning. The actors were men 
and women painted. I thought the fault was in 
them; but it was in myself, and the alteration which 
those many centuries — of six short twelvemonths — 
had wrought in me. Perhaps it was fortunte for me 
that the play of the evening was but an indifferent 
comedy, as it gave me time to crop some unreason- 
able expectations, which might have interfered with 
the genuine emotions with which I was soon after 
enabled to enter upon the first appearance to me of 
Mrs. Siddons in Isabella. Comparison and retro- 
spection soon yielded to the present attraction of the 
scene; and the theater became to me, upon a new 
stock, the most delightful of recreations. 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS 61 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 

Where were ye, Nymphs,, when the remorseless deep 
Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas? 

I do not know when I have experienced a stranger 
sensation than on seeing my old friend, G. D., who 
had been paying me a morning visit, a few Sundays 
back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, 
instead of turning down the right-hand path by 
which he had entered — with staff in hand, and at 
noonday, deliberately march right forward into the 
midst of the stream that runs by us and totally dis- 
appear. 

A spectacle like this at dusk would have been ap- 
palling enough; but in the broad, open daylight, to 
witness such an unreserved motion toward self-de- 
struction in a valued friend took from me all power 
of speculation. 

How I found my feet I know not. Conscious- 
ness was quite gone. Some spirit, not my own, 
whirled me to the spot. I remember nothing but 
the silvery apparition of a good white head emerg- 
ing; nigh with a staff (the hand unseen that wielded 
it) pointed upward, as feeling for the skies. In 
a moment (if time was in that time) he was on 
my shoulders, and I — freighted with a load more 
precious than his who bore Anchises. 

And here I cannot but do justice to the officious 
zeal of sundry passers-by, who, albeit arriving a 
little too late to participate in the honors of the res- 



62 LAMB 

cue, in philanthropic shoals came thronging to com- 
municate their advice as to the recovery; prescrib- 
ing variously the application, or non-application of 
salt, etc., to the person of the patient. Life, mean- 
time, was ebbing fast away, amid the stifle of con- 
flicting judgments, when one, more sagacious than 
the rest, by a bright thought, proposed sending for 
the Doctor. Trite as the counsel was, and im- 
possible, as one should think, to be missed on — 
shall I confess? — in this emergency it was to me as 
if an Angel had spoken. Great previous exertions — 
and mine had not been inconsiderable — are common- 
ly followed by a debility of purpose. This was a mo- 
ment of irresolution. 

Monoculus — for so, in default of catching his true 
name, I choose to designate the medical gentleman 
who now appeared — is a grave, middle-aged person, 
who without having studied at the college, or 
truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath em- 
ployed a great portion of his valuable time in ex- 
perimental processes upon the bodies of unfortunate 
fellow creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere 
vulgar thinking, would seem extinct and lost for- 
ever. He omitteth no occasion of intruding his 
services, from a case of common surfeit suffocation 
to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by 
a too willful application of the plant cannabis out- 
wardly. But though he declineth not altogether these 
drier extinctions, his occupation tendeth, for the 
most part, to water-practice; for the convenience of 
which he has judiciously fixed his quarters near the 
grand repository of the stream mentioned, where 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS 63 

day and night from his little watch-tower at the 
Middleton's Head, he listeneth to detect the wrecks 
of drowned mortality — partly, as he saith, to be 
upon the spot — and partly, because the liquids which 
he useth to prescribe to himself and his patients, on 
these distressing occasions, are ordinarily more con- 
veniently to be found at these common hostelries 
than in the shops and phials of the apothecaries. 
His ear hath arrived to such finesse by practice that 
it is reported he can distinguish a plunge at half a 
furlong distance, and can tell if it be casual or de- 
liberate. He weareth a medal, suspended over a 
suit, originally of a sad brown, but which, by time 
and frequency of nightly divings, has been dinged 
into a true professionable sable. He passeth by the 
name of Doctor, and is remarkable, for wanting his 
left eye. His remedy — after a sufficient application 
of warm blankets, friction, etc., is a simple tumbler, 
or more, or the purest Cognac, with water, made 
as hot as the convalescent can bear it. Where he 
findeth, as in the case of my friend, a squeamish 
subject, he condescendeth to be a taster; and show- 
eth, by his own example, the innocuous nature of 
the prescription. Nothing can be more kind or en- 
couraging than this procedure. It addeth confidence 
to the patient, to see his medical adviser go hand in 
hand with himself in the remedy. When the doctor 
swalloweth his own draught, what peevish invalid 
can refuse to pledge him in the potion? In fine, 
Monoculus is a humane, sensible man, who, for a 
slender pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, is con- 
tent to wear it out in the endeavour to save the lives 



64 LAMB 

of others — his pretensions so moderate, that with 
difficulty I could press a crown upon him, for the 
price of restoring the existence of such an invaluable 
creature to society as G. D. 

It was pleasant to observe the effect of the sub- 
siding alarm upon the nerves of the dear absentee. 
It seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling 
up notice after notice of all the providential deliv- 
erances he had experienced in the course of his long 
and innocent life. Sitting up on my couch — my 
couch which, naked and void of furniture hitherto, 
for the salutary repose which it administered, shall 
be honoured with costly valance, at some price, and 
henceforth be a state-bed at Colebrook — he dis- 
coursed of marvelous escapes — by carelessness of 
nurses; by pails of gelid, and kettles of the boiling 
element, in infancy; by orchard pranks, and snap- 
ping twigs, in school-boy frolics; by descent of tiles 
at Trumpington ; and of heavier tomes at Pembroke ; 
by studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance; 
by want, and the fear of want, and all the sore throb- 
bings of the learned head. Anon, he would burst 
out into little fragments of chanting, of songs, long 
ago, ends of deliverance hymns, not remembered 
before since childhood, but coming up now, when 
his heart was made as tender as a child's — for the 
tremor cordis, in the retrospect of a recent deliver- 
ance, as in the case of impending danger, acting 
upon an innocent heart, will produce a self-tender- 
ness, which we should do ill to christen cowardice; 
and Shakespeare, in the latter crisis, has made his 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS 65 

good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon, 
and to mutter of shallow rivers. 

Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton, what a spark you 
were like to have extinguished forever! Your sa- 
lubrious streams to this city, for now near two cen- 
turies, would hardly have atoned for what you 
were in a moment washing away. Mockery of a 
river — liquid artifice — wreathed conduit! henceforth 
rank with canals and sluggish aqueducts. Was it 
for this that, smit in boyhood with the explorations 
of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of 
Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace 
your salutary waters sparkling through green Hert- 
fordshire, and cultured Enfield parks? Ye have no 
swans, no Naiads, no river god — or did the benevo- 
lent hoary aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck him 
in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of 
your waters? 

Had he been drowned in Cam, there would have 
been some consonancy in it; but what willows had 
ye to wave and rustle over his moist sepulture? or 
having no name, besides that unmeaning assumption 
of eternal novity, did ye think to get one by the 
noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the stream 
Dyerian? 

And could such spacious virtue find a grave 
Beneath the impo^thumed bubble of a wave? 

I protest, George, you shall not venture out again 
— no, not by daylight — without a sufficient pair of 
spectacles — in your musing moods especially. Your 
absence of mind we have borne, till your presence 



66 LAMB 

of body came to be called in question by it. You 
shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, 
if we can help it. Fie, man, to turn dipper at your 
years, after your many tracts in favor of sprinkling 
only! 

I have nothing but water in my head o' nights 
since this frightful accident. Sometimes I am with 
Clarence in his dream. At others, I behold Chris- 
tian beginning to sink, and crying out to his good 
brother Hopeful (that is, to me), "I sink in deep 
waters ; the billows go over my head, all the waves 
go over me. Selah." Then I have before me Pali- 
nurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out too 
late to save. Next follow a mournful procession, 
suicidal faces, saved against their will from drown- 
ing; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant grateful- 
ness, with ropy weeds pendant from locks of watchet 
hue; constrained Lazari, Pluto's half-subjects, stolen 
fees from the grave, bilking Charon of his fare. 
At their head Arion — or is it G. D. ? — in his singing 
garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and 
votive garland, which Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) 
snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the 
stern God of Sea. Then follow dismal streams of 
Lethe, in which the half-drenched on earth are con- 
strained to drown downright, by wharfs where 
Ophelia twicts acts her muddy death. 

And, doubtless, there is some notice of that in- 
visible world when one of us approacheth (as my 
friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts. 
When a soul knocks once, twice, at Death's door, 
the sensation aroused within the palace must be 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS 67 

considerable; and the grim Feature, by modern 
science so often dispossessed of his prey, must have 
learnecl by this time to pity Tantalus. 

A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the 
Elysian shades, when the near arrival of G. D. was 
announced by equivocal indications. From their 
seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver 
ghosts — poet, or historian — of Grecian or of Roman 
lore — to crown with unfading chaplets the half-fin- 
ished love-labors of their unwearied scholiast. Him 
Markland expected, him Tyrwhitt hoped to en- 
counter, him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom 
he had barely seen upon earth,* with newest airs 

prepared to greet ; and patron of the gentle 

Christ's boy, who should have been his patron 
through life — the mild Askew, with longing aspira- 
tions leaning foremost from his venerable ^Escula- 
pian chair, to welcome into that happy company the 
matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in 
the boy he himself upon earth had so prophetically 
fed and watered. 



*Graium tantum vidit. 



68 LAMB 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 

Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my 
friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to 
me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat 
raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just 
as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is 
not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in 
the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where 
he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho- 
fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript 
goes on to say that the art of roasting, or rather 
broiling (which I take to be the elder brother), was 
accidentally discovered in the manner following. The 
swineherd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one 
morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for 
his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest 
son Bo-ho, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of 
playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly 
are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, 
which kindling quickly spread the conflagration over 
every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced 
to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry ante- 
diluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), 
what was of much more importance, a fine litter of 
new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, 
perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury 
all over the East, from the remotest periods that we 
read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as 
you may think, not so much for the sake o£ the tene- 



ROAST PIG 69 

ment, which his father and he could easily build up 
again with a few dry branches, and the labour of an 
hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. 
While he was thinking what he should say to his 
father, and wringing his hands over the smoking 
remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odour 
assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had 
before experienced. What could it proceed from? 
not from the burnt cottage, he had smelt that smell 
before; indeed, this was by no means the first acci- 
dent of the kind which had occurred through the 
negligence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much 
less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed, or 
flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time 
overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to 
think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there 
were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, 
and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion 
to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched 
skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first 
time in his life (in the world's life, indeed, for be- 
fore him no man had known it) he tasted — crackling! 
Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not 
burn him so much now, still he licked his fingers 
from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into 
his slow understanding, that it was the pig that 
smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; and 
surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, 
he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched 
skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it 
down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire 
entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retrib- 



70 LAMB 

utory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began 
to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as 
thick as hail-stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any 
more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleas- 
ure, which he experienced in his lower regions, had 
rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he 
might feel in those remote quarters. His father 
might lay on, but he could not beat him from his 
pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, be- 
coming a little more sensible of his situation, some- 
thing like the following dialogue ensued: 

"You graceless whelp, what have you got there 
devouring? Is it not enough that you have burnt me 
down three houses with your dog's tricks, and be 
hanged to you ! but you must be eating fire, and I 
know not what — what have you got there, I say?" 

"O father, the pig, the pig! do come and taste 
how nice the burnt pig eats." 

The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed 
his son, and he cursed himself that ever he should 
beget a son that should eat burnt pig. 

Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened 
since morning, soon raked out another pig, and 
fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half by 
main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, 
"Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste — O 
Lord!" — with such-like barbarous ejaculations, 
cramming all the while as if he would choke. 

Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped the 
abominable thing, wavering whether he should not 
put his son to death for an unnatural young monster, 
when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had 



ROAST PIG 71 

done his son's, and applying the same remedy to 
them, 4ie in turn tasted some of the flavour, which 
make what sour mouths he would for a pretence, 
proved not altogether displeasing to him. In con- 
clusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious), 
both father and son fairly set down to the mess, 
and never left off till they had dispatched all that 
remained of the litter. 

Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret 
escape, for the neighbours would certainly have 
stoned them for a couple of abominable wretches, 
who could think of improving upon the good meat 
which God had sent them. Nevertheless, strange 
stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti's cot- 
tage was burnt down now more frequently than ever. 
Nothing but fires from this time "forward. Some 
would break out in broad day, others in the night 
time. As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was 
the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze; and Ho-ti him- 
self, which was the more remarkable, instead of 
chastening his son, seemed to grow more indulgent 
to him than ever. At length they were watched, the 
terrible mystery discovered, and father and son sum- 
moned to take their trial at Pekin, then an incon- 
siderable assize town. Evidence was given, the ob- 
noxious food itself produced in court, and verdict 
about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the 
jury begged that some of the burnt pig, of which 
the culprits stood accused, might be handed into the 
box. He handled it, and they all handled it; and 
burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had 
done before them, and nature prompting to each of 



72 LAMB 

them the same remedy, against the face of all the 
facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever 
given — to the surprise of the whole court, townsfolk, 
strangers, reporters, and all present — without leaving 
the box, or any manner of consultation whatever, 
they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not 
Guilty. 

The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at 
the manifest iniquity of the decision : and when the 
court was dismissed, went privily and bought up all 
the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a 
few days his lordship's town-house was observed to 
be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was 
nothing to be seen but fires in every direction. Fuel 
and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. 
The insurance-offices one and all shut up shop. 
People built slighter and slighter every day, until it 
was feared that the very science of architecture 
would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus 
this custom of firing houses continued, till in process 
of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our 
Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, 
or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked 
(burnt, as they called it) without the necessity of 
consuming a whole house to dress it. Then first 
began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting by the 
string or spit came in a century or two later, T for- 
get in whose dynasty. By such sl6w degrees, con- 
cludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seem- 
ingly the most obvious, arts make their way among 
mankind. 

Without placing too implicit faith in the account 



ROAST PIG T3 

above given, it must be agreed that if a worthy pre- 
text for so dangerous an experiment as setting 
houses on fire (especially in these days) could be 
assigned in favor of any culinary object, that pretext 
and excuse might be found in roast pig. 

Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, 
I will maintain it to be the most delicate — princeps 
obsoniorum. 

I speak not of your grown porkers — things between 
pig and pork — those hobbledehoys — but a young and 
tender suckling — under a moon old — guiltless as yet 
of the sty, with no original speck of the amor im- 
munditicB, the hereditary failing of the first parent, 
yet manifest — his voice as yet not broken, but some- 
thing between a childish treble and a grumble — the 
mild forerunner or prceludium of a grunt. 

He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our 
ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled — but what a 
sacrifice of the exterior tegument! 

There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to 
that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over- 
roasted, crackling, as it is well called — the very 
teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at 
this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resist- 
ance — with the adhesive oleaginous — O call it not 
fat! but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it — 
the tender blossoming of fat — fat cropped in the bud 
— taken in the shoot, in the first innocence, the 
cream and quintessence of the child-pig's yet pure 
food, the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna, 
or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended 
and running into each other, that both together 



74 LAMB 

make but one ambrosian result or common sub- 
stance. 

Behold him while he is "doing" — it seemeth rather 
a refreshing warmth than a scorching heat, that he is 
so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the 
string! Now he is just done. To see the extreme 
sensibility of that tender age! he had wept out his 
pretty eyes — radiant jellies — shooting stars. 

See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek 
he lieth ! wouldst thou have had this innocent grow 
up to the grossness and indocility which too often 
accompany maturer swinehood? Ten to one 'he 
would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, 
disagreeable animal — wallowing in all manner of 
filthy conversation — from these sins he is happily 
snatched away — 

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, 
Death came with timely care — 

his memory is odoriferous — no clown curseth, while 
his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon — no coal- 
heaver bolteth him in reeking sausages — he hath a 
fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judi- 
cious epicure, and for such a tomb might be content 
to die. 

He is the best of sapors. Pine-apple is great. She 
is indeed almost too transcendent; a delight, if not 
sinful, yet so like to sinning, that really a tender- 
conscienced person would do well to pause; too 
ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and ex- 
coriateth the lips that approach her; like lovers' 
kisses she biteth ; she is pleasure bordering on 
pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish, 



ROAST PIG 75 

but she stoppeth at the palate; she meddleth not 
with the appetite, and the coarsest hunger might bar- 
ter her consistently for a mutton-chop. 

Pig, let me speak his praise, is no less provocative 
of the appetite than he is satisfactory to the critical* 
ness of the censorious palate. The strong man may 
batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his 
mild juices. 

Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of 
virtues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not 
to be unravelled without hazard, he is good through- 
out. No part of him is better or worse than another. 
He helpeth, as far as his little means extend, all 
around. He is the least envious of banquets. He is 
all neighbours' fare. 

I am one of those who freely and ungrudgingly 
impart a share of the good things of this life which 
fall to their lot (few as mine are" in this kind) to a 
friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my 
friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satis- 
factions, as in mine own. "Presents," I often say, 
"endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, 
snipes, barn-door chickens (those "tame villatic 
fowl"), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I 
dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste 
them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But 
a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like 
Lear, "give everything." I make my stand upon 
pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of 
all good flavours to extradomiciliate, or send out of 
the house slightingly (under pretext of friendship, 
or I know not what) a blessing so particularly 



76 LAMB 

adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual 
palate. It argues an insensibility. 

I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at 
school. My good old aunt, who never parted from 
me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweet- 
meat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, had dis- 
missed me one evening with a smoking plum-cake, 
fresh from the oven. In my way to school (it was 
over London Bridge) a gray-headed old beggar 
saluted me (I have no doubt, at this time of day, 
that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to con- 
sole him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and 
the very coxcombry of charity, school-boy like, I 
made him a present of — the whole cake ! I walked 
on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, 
with a sweet soothing of self-satisfaction; but, be- 
fore I had got to the end of the bridge, my better 
feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking 
how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go 
and give her good gift away to a stranger that I 
had never seen before, and who might be a bad man 
for aught I knew ; and then I thought of the pleas- 
ure my aunt would be taking in thinking that I — I 
myself, and not another — would eat her nice cake, 
and what should I say to her the next time I saw 
her; how naughty I was to part with her pretty 
present ! and the odour of that spicy cake came back 
upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the 
curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her 
joy when she sent it to the oven, and how dis- 
appointed she would feel that I had never had a bit 
of it in my mouth at last; and I blamed my imper- 



ROAST PIG 77 

tinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place hypoc- 
risy of goodness; and above all I wished never to 
see the face again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, 
old gray impostor. 

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacri- 
ficing these tender victims. We read of pigs whipped 
to death with something of a shock, as we hear of 
any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is 
gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a 
philosophical light merely) what effect this process 
might have toward intenerating and dulcifying a 
substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh 
of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet 
we should be cautious, while we condemn the in- 
humanity, how we censure the wisdom of the prac- 
tice. It might impart a gusto. 

I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the 
young students when I was at St. Omer's, and main- 
tained with much learning and pleasantry on both 
sides, "Whether, supposing that the flavour of a pig 
who obtained his death by whipping (per Hagella- 
tionem extremam) superadded a pleasure upon the 
palate of a man more intense than any possible suf- 
fering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified 
in using that method of putting the animal to death ?" 
I forget the decision. 

His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few 
bread crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and 
a dash of mild sage. But banish, dear Mrs. Cook, 
I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your 
whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, 
stuff them out with plantations of the rank and 



78 LAMB 



guilty garlic; you cannot poison them, or make 
them stronger than they are — but consider, he is a 
weakling — a flower. 



POOR RELATIONS. 

A Poor Relation is the most irrelevant thing in 
nature, a piece of impertinent correspondency, an 
odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a pre- 
posterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of 
our prosperity; an unwelcome remembrancer, a per- 
petually recurring mortification, a drain on your 
purse, a more intolerable dun upon your pride, a 
drawback upon success, a rebuke to your rising, a 
stain in your blood, a blot on your 'scutcheon, a rent 
in your garment, a death's head at your banquet, 
Agathocle's pot, a Mordecai in your gate, a Lazarus 
at your door, a lion in your path, a frog in your 
chamber, a fly in your ointment, a mote in your eye, 
a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your friends, 
the one thing not needful, the hail in harvest, the 
ounce of sour in a pound of sweet. 

He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you 

"That is Mr. ." A rap, between familiarity and 

respect; that demands, and at the same time seems 
to despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling 
and embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you 
to shake, and draweth it back again. He casually 
looketh in about dinner-time — when the table is full. 
He offereth to go away, seeing you have company, 
but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your 



POOR RELATIONS TO 

visitor's two children are accommodated at a side- 
table. He never cometh upon open days, when your 
wife says, with some complacency, "My dear, perhaps 
Mr. — — will drop in today." He remembereth 
birthdays, and professeth he is fortunate to have 
stumbled upon one. He declareth against fish, the 
turbot being small, yet suffereth himself to be im- 
portuned into a slice against his first resolution. He 
sticketh by the port, yet he will be prevailed upon to 
empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger 
press it upon him. He is a puzzle to the servants, 
who are fearful of being too obsequious, or not civil 
enough, to him. The guests think "they have seen 
him before." Every one speculateth upon his con- 
dition; and the most part take him to be a tide- 
waiter. He calleth you by your Christian name to 
imply that his other is the same with your own. He 
is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less 
diffidence. With half his familiarity he might pass 
for a casual dependent; with more boldness, he 
would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. 
He is too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him 
more state than befits a client. He is a worse guest 
than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up 
no rent, yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanour, 
that your guests take him for one. He is asked to 
make one at the whist table; refuseth on the score 
of poverty, and resents being left out. When the 
company breaks up, he proffereth to go for a coach, 
and lets the servant go. He recollects your grand- 
father, and will thrust in some mean and quite un- 
important anecdote of the family. He knew it 



80 LAMB 

when it was not quite so flourishing as "he is blest in 
seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, to 
institute what he calleth favourable comparisons. 
With a reflecting sort of congratulation he will in- 
quire the price of your furniture, and insults you 
with a special commendation of your window-cur- 
tains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more 
elegant shape; but, after all, there was something 
more comfortable about the old tea-kettle, which 
you must remember. He dare say you must find a 
great convenience in having a carriage of your own, 
and appealeth to your lady if it is not so. Inquireth 
if you have had your arms done on vellum yet ; and 
did not know, till lately, that such-and-such had 
been the crest of the family. His memory is un- 
seasonable ; his compliments perverse ; his talk a 
trouble ; his stay pertinacious ; and when he goeth 
away, you dismiss his chair into a corner as pre- 
cipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two 
nuisances. 

There is a wors"e evil under the sun, and that is 
a female poor relation. You may do something 
with the other; you may pass him off tolerably 
well; but your indigent she-relative is hopeless. 
"He is an old humorist," you may say, "and affects 
to go threadbare. His circumstances are better than 
folks would take them to be. You are fond of hav- 
ing a character at your table, and truly he is one." 
But in the indications of female poverty there can 
be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself 
from caprice. The truth must out without shuffling. 
"She is plainly related to the L 's; or what does 



POOR RELATIONS 81 

she at their house?" She is, in all probability, your 
wife's cousin. Nine times out of ten, at least, this 
is thejcase. Her garb is something between a gen- 
tlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently 
predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and 
ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority. He may 
require to be repressed sometimes — aliquando suf- 
Aaminandus erat — but there is no raising her. You 
send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped 

— after the gentlemen. Mr. requests the honour 

of taking wine with her; she hesitates between Port 
and Madeira, and chooses the former because he 
does. She calls the servant Sir; and insists on not 
troubling him to hold her plate. The housekeeper 
patronizes her. The children's governess takes 
upon her to correct her, when she has mistaken the 
piano for a harpsichord. 

Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable in- 
stance of the disadvantages to which this chimerical 
notion of affinity constituting a claim to acquaint- 
ance, may subject the spirit of a gentleman. A lit- 
tle foolish blood is all that is between him and the 
lady with a great estate. His stars are perpetually 
crossed by the malignant maternity of an old 
woman, who persists in calling him "her son Dick." 
But she has wherewithal in the end to recompense 
his indignities, and float him again upon the bril- 
liant surface, under which it had been her seeming 
business and pleasure all along to sink him. All 
men, besides, are not of Dick's temperament. I 
knew an Amlet in real life, who, wanting Dick's 
buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor W was of my own 



82 LAMB 

standing at Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth of 
promise. If he had a blemish, it was too much 
pride; but its quality was inoffensive; it was not 
of that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to 
keep inferiors at a distance; it only sought to 
ward off derogation from itself. It was the prin- 
ciple of self-respect carried as far as it could go, 
without infringing upon that respect which he would 
have every one else equally maintain for himself. 
He would have you to think alike with him on this 
topic. Many a quarrel have I had with him, when 
we were rather older boys, and our tallness made 
us more obnoxious to observation in the blue 
clothes, because I would not tread the alleys and 
blind ways of the town with him to elude notice, 
when we have been out together on a holiday in 
the streets of this sneering and prying metropolis. 

W went, sore with these notions, to Oxford, 

where the dignity and sweetness of a scholar's life, 
meeting with the alloy of a humble introduction, 
wrought in him a passionate devotion to the place, 
with a profound aversion from the society. The 
servitor's gown (worse than his school array) clung 
to him with Nessian venom. He thought himself 
ridiculous in a garb, under which Latimer must 
have walked erect, and in which Hooker, in his 
young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of no dis- 
commendable vanity. In the depth of college 
shades, or in his lonely chamber, the poor student 
shrunk from observation. He found shelter among 
books, which insult not; and studies, that ask no 
questions of a youth's finances. He was lord of 



POOR RELATIONS 83 

his library, and seldom cared for looking out beyond 
his domains. The healing influence of studious pur- 
suits "was upon him to soothe and to abstract. He 
was almost a healthy man, when the waywardness 
of his fate broke out against him with a second 

and worse malignity. The father of W had 

hitherto exercised the humble profession of house- 
painter, at N , near Oxford. A supposed inter- 
est with some of the heads of colleges had now in- 
duced him to take up his abode in that city, with 
the hope of being employed upon some public works 
which were talked of. From that moment I read 
in the countenance of the young man the determina- 
tion which at length tore him from academical pur- 
suits for ever. To a person unacquainted with our 
universities, the distance between the gownsmen 
and the townsmen, as they are called — the trading 
part of the latter especially — is carried to an excess 
that would appear harsh and incredible. The tem- 
perament of W 's father was diametrically the 

reverse of his own. Old W was a little, busy, 

cringing tradesman, who, with his son upon his 
arm, would stand bowing and scraping, cap in hand, 
to anything that wore the semblance of a gown — 
insensible to the winks and opener remonstrances 
of the young man, to whose chamber-fellow, or 
equal in standing, perhaps, he was thus obsequiously 
and gratuitously ducking. Such a state of things 
could not last. W must change the air of Ox- 
ford, or be suffocated. He chose the former; and 
let the sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the 
filial duties as high as they can bear, censure the 



84: LAMB 

dereliction; he cannot estimate the struggle. I 

stood with W , the last afternoon I ever saw 

him, under the eaves of his paternal dwelling. It 
was in the fine lane leading from the High Street 

to the back of college, where W kept his 

rooms. He seemed thoughtful and more reconciled. 
I ventured to rally him — finding him in a better 
mood — upon a representation of the Artist Evan- 
gelist, which the old man, whose affairs were be- 
ginning to flourish, had caused to be set up in a 
splendid sort of frame over his really handsome 
shop, either as a token of prosperity or badge of 

gratitude to his saint. W looked up at the 

Luke, and, like Satan, "knew his mounted sign — 
and fled." A letter on his father's table, the next 
morning, announced that he had accepted a com- 
mission in a regiment about to embark for Por- 
tugal. He was among the first who perished before 
the walls of St. Sebastian. 

I do not know how, upon a subject which I began 
with treating half seriously, I should have fallen 
upon a recital so eminently painful ; but this theme 
of poor relationship is replete with so much matter 
for tragic as well as comic associations, that it is 
difficult to keep the account distinct without blend- 
ing. The earliest impressions which I received on 
this matter are certainly not attended with any- 
thing painful, or very humiliating, in the recalling. 
At my father's table (no very splendid one) was to 
be found, every Saturday, the mysterious figure of 
an aged gentleman, clothed in neat black, of a sad 
yet comely appearance. His deportment was of the 



POOR RELATIONS 85 

essence of gravity; his words few or none; and I 
was not to make a noise in his presence. I had 
little inclination to have done so, for my cue was 
to admire in silence. A particular elbow-chair was 
appropriated to him, which was in no case to be 
violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which 
appeared on no other occasion, distinguished the 
days of his coming. I used to think him a pro- 
digiously rich man. All I could make out of him 
was, that he and my father had been school-fellows, 
a world ago, at Lincoln, and that he came from the 
Mint. The Mint I knew to be a place where all 
the money was coined — and I thought he was the 
owner of all that money. Awful ideas of the Tower 
twined themselves about his presence. He seemed 
above human infirmities and passjons. A sort of 
melancholy grandeur invested him. From some in- 
explicable doom I fancied him obliged to go about 
in an eternal suit of mourning; a captive — a stately 
being let out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often 
have I wondered at the temerity of my father, who, 
in spite of an habitual general respect which we all 
in common manifested toward him, would venture 
now and then to stand up against him in some argu- 
ment touching their youthful days. The houses of 
the ancient city of Lincoln are divided (as most of 
my readers know) between the dwellers on the hill 
and in the valley. This marked distinction formed 
an obvious division between the boys who lived 
above (however brought together in a common 
school) and the boys whose paternal residence was 
on the plain; a sufficient cause of hostility in the 



86 LAMB 

code of these young Grotiuses. My father had been 
a leading Mountaineer; and would still maintain 
the general superiority in skill and hardihood of the 
Above Boys (his own faction) over the Below Boys 
(so were they called), of which party his contem- 
porary had been a chieftain. Many and hot were 
the skirmishes on this topic — the only one upon 
which the old gentleman was ever brought out — and 
bad blood bred; even sometimes almost to the 
recommencement (so I expected) of actual hostili- 
ties. But my father, who scorned to insist upon 
advantages, generally contrived to turn the conver- 
sation upon some adroit by-commendation of the 
old Minister; in the general preference of which, 
before all other cathedrals in the island, the dweller 
on the hill, and the plain-born, could meet on a con- 
ciliating level, and lay down their less important 
differences. Once only I saw the old gentleman 
really ruffled, and I remember with anguish the 
thought that came over me : "Perhaps he will never 
come here again." He had been pressed to take 
another plate of the viand, which I have already 
mentioned as the indispensable concomitant of his 
visits. He had refused with a resistance amounting 
to rigor, when my aunt, an old Lincolnian, but who 
had something of this, in common with my cousin 
Bridget, that she would sometimes press civility out 
of season, uttered the following memorable applica- 
tion — "Do take another slice, Mr. Billet, for you 
do not get pudding every day." The old gentleman 
said nothing at the time, but he took occasion in 
the course of the evening, when some argument 



POOR RELATIONS 87 

had intervened between them, to utter with an em- 
phasis which chilled the company, and which chills 
me now as I write it — "Woman, you are superan- 
nuated!" John Billet did not survive long after the 
digesting of this affront; but he survived long 
enough to assure me that peace was actually re- 
stored; and, if I remember aright, another pudding 
was discreetly substituted in the place of that 
which had occasioned the offense. He died at the 
Mint (anno 1781) where he had long held what he 
accounted a comfortable independence ; and with 
five pounds, fourteen shillings, and a penny, which 
were found in his escritoir after his decease, left 
the world, blessing God that he had enough to 
bury him, and that he had never been obliged to 
any man for a sixpence. This was — a Poor Rela- 
tion. 



88 LAMB 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. 

"A clear fire, a clean hearth,* and a rigour of the 
game." This was the celebrated wish of old Sarah 
Battle (now with God), who, next to her devotions, 
loved a good game of whist. She was none of your 
lukewarm gamesters, your half-and-half players who 
have no objection to take a hand, if you want one to 
make up a rubber, who affirm that they have no 
pleasure in winning; that they like to win one game 
and lose another; that they can while away an hour 
very agreeably at a card-table, but are indifferent 
whether they play or no; and will desire an adver- 
sary, who has slipped a wrong card, to take it up 
and play another.t These insufferable triflers are 
the curse of a table. One of these flies will spoil a 
whole pot. Of such it may be said that they do not 
play at cards, but only play at playing at them. 

Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She de- 
tested them as I do, from her heart and soul, and 
would not, save upon a striking emergency, willingly 
seat herself at the same table with them. She loved 
a thorough-paced partner, a determined enemy. She 
took and gave no concessions. She hated favors. 
She never made a revoke, nor ever passed it over in 
her adversary without exacting the utmost forfeiture. 



*This was before the introduction of rugs, reader. You 
must remember the intolerable crash of the unswept cinders 
betwixt your foot and the marble. 

tAs if a sportsman should tell you he liked to kill a foac 
one day and lose him the next. 



MRS. BATTLE ON WHIST 89 

She fought a good fight: cut and thrust. She held 
not her good sword (her cards) "like a dancer." 
She* sat bolt upright; and neither showed you her 
cards, nor desired to see yours. All people have their 
blind side — their superstitions; and I have heard her 
declare under the rose, that hearts was her favourite 
suit. 

I never in my life — and I knew Sarah Battle many 
of the best years of it — saw her take out her snuff- 
box when it was her turn to play; or snuff a candle 
in the middle of a game; or ring for a servant, till 
it was fairly over. She never introduced, or con- 
nived at miscellaneous conversation during its pro- 
cess. As she emphatically observed, cards were 
cards; and if I ever saw unmingled distaste in her 
fine last-century countenance, it w.as at the airs of a 
young gentleman of a literary turn, who had been 
with difficulty persuaded to take a hand ; and who, in 
his excess of candour, declared that he thought there 
was no harm in unbending the mind now and then, 
after serious studies in recreations of that kind! 
She could not bear to have her noble occupation, to 
which she wound up her faculties, considered in that 
light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she 
came into the world to do, and she did it. She 
unbent her mind afterward — over a book. 

Pope was her favourite author: his Rape of the 
Lock her favourite work. She once did me the favour 
to play over with me (with the cards) his celebrated 
game of Omber in that poem; and to explain to me 
how far it agreed with, and in what points it would 
be found to differ from tradrille. Her illustrations 



90 LAMB 

were opposite and poignant; and I had the pleasure 
of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles; 
but I suppose they came too late to be inserted 
among his ingenious notes upon that author. 

Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first 
love ; but whist had engaged her maturer esteem. 
The former, she said, was showy and specious, and 
likely to allure young persons. The uncertainty and 
quick shifting of partners — a thing which the con- 
stancy of whist abhors; the dazzling supremacy and 
regal investiture of Spadille — absurd, as she justly 
observed, in the pure aristocracy of whist, where his 
crown and garter give him no proper power above 
his brother-nobility of the aces; the giddy; vanity, 
so taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone 
above all, the overpowering attractions of a Sans 
Prendre Vole, to the triumph of which there is cer- 
tainly nothing parallel or approaching, in the contin- 
gencies of whist; all these, she would say, make 
quadrille a game of captivation to the young and 
enthusiastic. But whist was the solider game: that 
was her word. It was a long meal; not like quad- 
rille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers 
might co-extend in duration with an evening. They 
gave time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate 
steady enmities. She despised the chance-started, 
capricious, and ever-fluctuating alliances of the 
other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, 
reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilmnts of 
the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel : per- 
petually changing postures and connections; bitter 
foes today, sugared darlings tomorrow; kissing and 



MRS. BATTCE ON WHIST 91 

scratching in a breath; but the wars of whist were 
comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, national 
antipathies of the great French and English nations. 

A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired 
in her favourite game. There was nothing silly in 
it, like the nob in cribbage — nothing superfluous. No 
Hushes — that most irrational of all pleas that a rea- 
sonable being can set up: that any one should claim 
four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark 
and colour, without reference to the playing of the 
game, or the individual worth or pretentions of the 
cards themselves ! She held this to be a solecism ; 
as pitiful an ambition at cards as alliteration is in 
authorship. She despised superficiality, and looked 
deeper than the color of things. Suits were soldiers, 
she would say, and must have a uniformity of array 
to distinguish them ; but what should we say to a 
foolish squire, who should claim a merit from dress- 
ing up his tenantry in red jackets, that never were 
to be marshalled — never to take the field ! She even 
wished that whist were more simple than it is; and, 
in my mind, would have stripped it of some appen- 
dages, which, in the state of human frailty, may be 
venially, ana even commendably, allowed of. She 
saw no reason for the deciding of the trump by the 
turn of the card. Why not one suit always trumps? 
Why two colours, when the mark of the suit would 
have sufficiently distinguished them without it? 

"But the eye, my dear madam, is agreeably re- 
freshed with the variety. Man is not a creature of 
pure reason — he must have his senses delightfully 
appealed to. We see it in Roman Catholic coun- 



92 LAMB 

tries, where the music and the paintings draw in 
many to worship, whom your Quaker spirit of un- 
sensualizing would have kept out. You yourself 
have a pretty collection of paintings — but confess 
to me, whether, walking in your gallery at Sand- 
ham, among those clear Vandykes, or among the 
Paul Potters in the ante-room, you ever felt your 
bosom glow with an elegant delight at all com- 
parable to that you have it in your power to experi- 
ence most evenings over a well-arranged asortment 
of the court-cards? the pretty antic habits, like 
heralds in a procession, the gay triumph-assuring 
scarlets, the contrasting deadly-killing sables, the 
"hoary majesty of spades" — Pam in all his glory! 

"All these might be dispensed with; and with 
their naked names upon the drab pasteboard, the 
game might go on very well, pictureless ; but the 
beauty of cards would be extinguished forever. 
Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, they 
must degenerate into mere gambling. Imagine a 
dull deal board, or drum-head, to spread them on, 
instead of that nice verdant carpet (next to na- 
ture's), fittest arena for those courtly combatants 
to play their gallant jousts and turneys in! Ex- 
change those delicately-turned ivory markers — (work 
of Chinese artist, unconscious of their symbol, or as 
profanely slighting their true application as the 
arrantest Ephesian journeyman that turned out 
those little shrines for the goddess) — exchange 
them for little bits of leather (our ancestors' money), 
or chalk and a slate!" 

The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness 



MRS. BATTLE ON WHIST 93 

of my logic; and to her approbation of my argu- 
ments .on her favourite topic that evening I have 
always fancied myself indebted for the legacy of a 
curious cribbage-board, made of the finest Sienna 
marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter 
Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated) brought 
with him from Florence; this, and a trifle of five 
hundred pounds, came to me at her death. 

The former bequest (which I do not least value) 
I have kept with religious care, though she herself, 
to confess the truth, was never greatly taken with 
cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar game, I have 
heard her say, disputing with her uncle, who was 
very partial to it. She could never heartily bring 
her mouth to pronounce "Go" or "That's a go." 
She called it an ungrammatical game. The pegging 
teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber 
(a five-dollar stake) because she would not take 
advantage of the turn-up knave, which would have 
given it her, but which she must have claimed by 
the disgraceful tenure of declaring "two for his 
heels." There is something extremely genteel in 
this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentle- 
woman born. 

Piquet she held the best game at the cards for 
two persons, though she would ridicule the pedan- 
try of the terms, such as pique, repique, the capot — 
they savored (she thought) of affectation. But 
games for two, or even three, she never greatly 
cared for. She loved the quadrate, or square. She 
would argue thus : Cards are warfare : the ends 
are gain, with glory. But cards are war, in dis- 



94 LAMB 

guise of a sport: when single adversaries encounter, 
the ends proposed are too palpable. By themselves, 
it is too close a fight ; with spectators, it is not much 
bettered. No looker-on can be interested, except 
for a bet, and then it is a mere affair of money; he 
cares not for your luck sympathetically, or for 
your play. Three are still worse; a mere naked 
war of every man against every man, as in cribbage, 
without league or alliance; or a rotation of petty 
and contradictory interests, a succession of heartless 
leagues, and not much more hearty infractions of 
them, as in tradrille. But in square games (she 
meant whist), all that is possible to be attained in 
card-playing is accomplished. There are the in- 
centives of profit with honour, common to every 
species — though the latter can be but very imper- 
fectly enjoyed in those other games, where the 
spectator is only feebly a participator. But the par- 
ties in whist are spectators and principals too. They 
are a theater to themselves, and a looker-on is not 
wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, and an 
impertinence. Whist abhors neutrality, or interests 
beyond its sphere. You glory in some surprising 
stroke of skill or fortune, not because a cold — or 
even an interested — bystander witnesses it, but be- 
cause your partner sympathizes in the contingency. 
You win for two. You triumph for two. Two are 
exalted. Two again are mortified ; which divides 
their disgrace, as the conjunction doubles (by tak- 
ing off the invidiousness) your glories. Two losing 
to two are better reconciled than one to one in that 
close butchery, The hostile feeling is weakened by 



MRS. BATTLE ON WHIST 95 

multiplying the channels. War becomes a civil game. 
By such reasonings as these the old lady was accus- 
tomed to defend her favorite pastime. 

No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play 
at any game, where chance entered into the com- 
position, for nothing. Chance, she would argue — and 
here again admire the subtlety of her conclusion — 
chance is nothing, but where something else depends 
upon it. It is obvious that cannot be glory. What 
rational cause of exultation could it give to a man 
to turn up size ace a hundred times together by 
himself? or before spectators, where no stake was 
depending? Make a lottery of a hundred thousand 
tickets with but one fortunate number — and what 
possible principle of our nature, except stupid won- 
derment, could it gratify to gain that number as 
many times successively without a prize? There- 
fore she disliked the mixture of chance in back- 
gammon, where it was not played for money. She 
called it foolish, and those people idiots, who were 
taken with a lucky hit under such circumstances. 
Games of pure skill were as little to her fancy. 
Played for a stake, they were a mere system of over- 
reaching. Played for glory, they were a mere setting 
of one man's wit, his memory, or combination- 
faculty rather, against another's; like a mock-en- 
gagement at a review, bloodless and profitless. She 
could not conceive a game wanting the spritely 
infusion of chance, the handsome excuses of good 
fortune. Two people playing at chess in a corner 
of a room whilst whist was stirring in the center, 
would inspire her with insufferable horror and 



96 LAMB 

ennui. Those well-cut similitudes of Castles and 
Knights, the imagery of the board, she would argue 
(and I think in this case justly), were entirely mis- 
placed and senseless. Those hard-head contests can 
in no instance ally with the fancy. They reject 
form and colour. A pencil and dry slate (she used 
to say) were the proper arena for such com- 
batants. 

To those puny objectors against cards, as nur- 
turing the bad passions, she would retort, that man 
is a gaming animal. He must be always trying to 
get the better in something or other: that this pas- 
sion can scracely be more safely expended than 
upon a game at cards : that cards are a temporary 
illusion; in truth, a mere drama; for we do but 
play at being mightily concerned, where a few idle 
shillings are at stake, yet, during the illusion, we 
are as mightily concerned as those whose stake is 
crowns and kingdoms. They are a sort of dream- 
fighting; much ado, great battling, and little blood- 
shed ; mighty means for disproportioned ends : quite 
as diverting, and a great deal more innoxious, than 
many of those more serious games of life, which 
men play without esteeming them to be such. 

With great deference to the old lady's judgment 
in these matters, I think I have experienced some 
moments in my life when playing at cards for noth- 
ing has even been agreeable. When I am in sick- 
ness, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes call for 
the cards, and play a game at piquet for love with 
my cousin Bridget — Bridget Elia. 

I grant there is something sneaking in it; but 



MRS. BATTLE ON WHIST 97 

with a toothache, or a sprained ankle, when you 
are subdued and humble, you are glad to put up 
with an inferior spring of action. 

There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, 
as sick whist. 

I grant it is not the highest style of man — I dep- 
recate the manes of Sarah Battle — she lives not, 
alas ! to whom I should apologize. 

At such times, those terms which my old friend 
objected to, come in as something admissible. I 
love to get a tierce or a quatorze, though they 
mean nothing. I am subdued to an inferior interest. 
Ihose shadows of winning amuse me. 

That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I 
capotted her — dare I tell thee, how foolish I am?), 
I wished it might have lasted forever, though we 
gained nothing, and lost nothing, though it was a 
mere shade of play: I would be content to go on 
in that idle folly forever. The pipkin should be 
ever boiling, that was to prepare the gentle leni- 
tive to my foot, which Bridget was doomed to apply 
after the game was over : and, as I do not much 
relish appliances, there it should ever bubble. 
Bridget and I should be ever playing. 



LAMB 



OLD CHINA. 

I have an almost feminine partiality for old china. 
When I go to see any great house, I inquire for 
the china closet, and next for the picture gallery. 
I cannot defend the order of preference, but by 
saying that we have all some taste or other, of too 
ancient a date to admit of our remembering dis- 
tinctly that it was an acquired one. I can call to 
mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that 
I was taken to; but I am not conscious of a time 
when china jars and saucers were introduced into 
my imagination. 

I had no repugnance then — why should I now 
have? — to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured gro- 
tesques, that, under the notion of men and women, 
float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that 
world before perspective — a china tea cup. 

I like to see my old friends, whom distance can- 
not diminish, figuring up in the air (so they appear 
to our optics), yet on terra Hrrna still — for so we 
must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper 
blue, which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, 
had made to spring up beneath their sandals. 

I love the men with women's faces, and women, 
if possible, with still more womanish expressions. 

Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing 
tea to a lady from a salver — two miles off. See 
how distance seems to set off respect! And here 
the same lady, or another — for likeness is identity 
on tea cups — is stepping into a little fairy boat, 



OLD CHINA 99 

moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, 
with a -dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle 
of incidence (as angles go in our world) must in- 
fallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead — 
a furlong off on the other side of the same strange 
stream ! 

Farther on — if far and near can be predicated of 
their world — see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing 
the hays. 

Here — a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-exten- 
sive — so objects show, seen through the lucid at- 
mosphere of fine Cathay. 

I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over 
our Hyson (which we are old-fashioned enough to 
drink unmixed still of an afternoon), some of these 
speciosa miracula upon a set of extraordinary old 
blue china (a recent purchase) which we are now 
for the first time using; and could not help remark- 
ing how favorable circumstances had been to us of 
late years, that we could afford to please the eye 
sometimes with trifles of this sort — when a passing 
sentiment seemed to overshade the brows of my 
companion. I am quick at detecting these summer 
clouds in Bridget. 

"I wish the good old times would come again," 
she said, "when we were not qute so rich. I do not 
mean that I want to be poor ; but there was a middle 
state," so she was pleased to ramble on, "in which 
I am sure we were a great deal happier. A pur- 
chase is but a purchase, now that you have money 
enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a 
triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury (and, 

Lofa 



100 LAMB 

O ! how much ado I had to get you to consent in 
those times!) we were used to have a debate two 
or three days before, and to weigh the for and 
against, and think what we might spare it out of, 
and what saving we could hit upon, that should be 
an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, 
when we felt the money that we paid for it. 

"Do you remember the brown suit, which you 
made to hang upon you, till all our friends cried 
shame upon you, it grew so threadbare — and all 
because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which 
you dragged home late at night from Barker's in 
Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed 
it for weeks before we could make up our minds 
to the purchase, and had not come to a determina- 
tion till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday 
night, when you set off from Islington, fearing 
you should be too late — and when the old book- 
seller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by 
the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedward) 
lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures — and 
when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as 
cumbersome — and when you presented it to me — • 
and when we were exploring the perfectness of it 
{collating, you called it) — and while I was repair- 
ing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your 
impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak 
— was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or 
can those neat black clothes which you wear now 
and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have 
become rich and finical — give you half the honest 
vanity with which you flaunted it about in that 



OLD CHINA 101 

overworn suit — your old carbeau — for four or five 
weeks* longer than you should have done, to pacify 
your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen — or 
sixteen shillings was it? — a great affair we thought 
it then — which you had lavished on the old folio. 
Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases 
you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home 
any nice old purchases now. 

"When you came home with twenty apologies for 
laying out a less number of shillings upon that 
print after Lionardo, which we christened the 'Lady 
Blanch/ when you looked at the purchase, and 
thought of the money — and thought of the money, 
and looked again at the picture — was there no pleas- 
ure in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing 
to do but to walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilder- 
ness of Lionardos. Yet do you? 

"Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to 
Enfield, and Potter's bar, and Waltham, when we 
had a holiday — holidays and all other fun are gone 
now we are rich — and the little handbasket in 
which I used to deposit our day's fare of savory 
cold lamb and salad — and how you would pry about 
at noontide for some decent house, where we might 
go and produce our store — only paying for the ale 
that you must call for — and speculate upon the looks 
of the landlady, and whether she was likely to allow 
us a tablecloth — and wish for such another honest 
hostess as Izaak Walton has described many a one 
on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when he went a 
fishing — and sometimes they would prove obliging 
enough, and sometimes they would look grudgingly 



102 LAMB 

upon us — but we had cheerful looks still for one 
another, and would eat our plain food savorily, 
scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall? Now, 
when we go out a day's pleasuring, which is seldom, 
moreover, we ride part of the way, and go into a 
fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never de- 
bating the expense, which, after all, never has half 
the relish of those chance country snaps, when we 
were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a pre- 
carious welcome. 

"You are too proud to see a play anywhere now 
jut in the pit. Do you remember where it was we 
used to sit, when we saw the Battle of Hexham, 
and the Surrender of Calais, and Bannister and Mrs. 
Bland in the Children in the Wood — when we 
squeezed out our shilling apiece to sit three or four 
times in a season in the one-shilling gallery — where 
you felt all the time that you ought not to have 
brought me — and more strongly I felt obligations to 
you for having brought me — and the pleasure was the 
better for a little shame — and when the curtain drew 
up, what care we for our place in the house or what 
mattered it where we were sitting, when our 
thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden, or with 
Viola at the Court of Illyria? You used to say 
that the gallery was the best place of all for en- 
joying a play socially ; that the relish of such ex- 
hibitions must be in proportion to the infrcquency 
of going; that the company we met there, not being 
in general readers of plays, were obliged to attend 
the more, and did attend, to what was going on on 
the stage, because a word lost would have been a 



OLD CHINA 103 

chasm which it was impossible for them to fill up. 
With -such reflections we consoled our pride then, 
and I appeal to you whether, as a woman, I met 
generally with less attention and accommodation 
than I have done since in more expensive situations 
in the house? The getting in, indeed, and the 
crowding up those inconvenient staircases, was bad 
enough, but there was still a law of civility to 
women recognized to quite as great an extent as 
we ever found in other passages, and how a little 
difficulty overcome heightened the snug seat and 
the play afterward! Now we can only pay our 
money and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in 
the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard, too, 
well enough then, but sight, and all, I think, is gone 
with our poverty. 

"There was pleasure in eating strawberries before 
they became quite common ; in the first dish of peas, 
while they were yet dear, to have them for a nice 
supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? If 
we were to treat ourselves now — that is, to have 
dainties a little above our means, it would be selfish 
and wicked. It is the very little more that we allow 
ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, 
that makes what I call a treat — when two people 
living together as we have done, now and then in- 
dulge themselves in a cheap luxury, which both 
like; while each apologizes, and is willing to take 
both halves of the blame to his single share. I see 
no harm in people making much of themselves, in 
that sense of the word. It may give them a hint 
how to make much of others. But now, what I 



104 LAMB 

mean by the word, we never do make much of our- 
selves. None but the poor can do it. I do not 
mean the veriest poor of all, but persons as we 
were, just above poverty. 

"I know what you were going to say, that it is 
mighty pleasant at the end of the year to make all 
meet — and much ado we used to have every thirty- 
first night of December to account for our exceed- 
ings — many a long face did you make over your 
puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it out 
how we had spent so much, or that we had not 
spent so much, or that it was impossible that we 
should spend so much next year, and still we found 
our slender capital decreasing; but then, betwixt 
ways and projects, and compromises of one sort 
or another, and talk of curtailing this charge, and 
doing without that for the future, and the hope that 
youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which you 
were never poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, 
and in conclusion, with 'lusty brimmers' (as we 
used to quote it out of hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton, 
as you called him), we used to welcome in the 'com- 
ing guest.' Now we have no reckoning at all at the 
end of the old year ; no flattering promises about the 
new year doing better for us." 

Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occa- 
sions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I 
am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, 
however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which 
her dear imagination had conjured up out of a 

clear income of poor hundred pounds a year. 

"It is true we were happier when we were poorer, 



OLD CHINA 105 

but we were also younger, my cousin. I am afraid 
we myst put up with the excess, for if we were to 
shake the superflux into the sea, we should not 
much mend ourselves. That we had much to strug- 
gle with, as we grew up together, we have reason 
to be most thankful. It strengthened and knit our 
compact closer. We could never have been what 
we have been to each other, if we had always had 
the sufficiency which you now complain of. The 
resisting power, those natural dilations of the youth- 
ful spirit, which circumstances can not straighten — 
with us are long since passed away. Competence 
to age is supplementary to youth, a sorry supple- 
ment indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. 
We must ride where we formally walked : live 
better and lie softer — and shall be wise to do so — 
than we had means to do in those good old days you 
speak of. Yet could those days return, could you 
and I once more walk our thirty miles a day, could 
Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, and 
you and I be young to see them, could the good 
old one shilling gallery days return — they are 
dreams, my cousin, now — but could you and I at 
this moment — instead of this quiet argument, by our 
well-carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxurious sofa 
— be once more struggling up those inconvenient 
staircases, pushed about and squeezed, and elbowed 
by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers — 
could I once more hear those anxious shrieks of 
yours, and the delicious Thank God, we are safe, 
which always followed, when the topmost stair, 
conquered, let in the first light of the whole cheer- 



106 LAMB 

ful theater down beneath us — I know not the fathom 
line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would 
be willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had, 

or the great Jew R is supposed to have, to 

purchase it. And now do just look at that merry little 
Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for 
a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty insipid 
half-Madonna-ish chit of a lady in that very blue 
summer house." 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 

I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts 
and sympathizeth with all things. I have no an- 
tipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy in anything. Those 
natural repugnancies do not touch me, nor do I be- 
hold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, 
or Dutch. — Religio Medici. 

That the author of the Religio Medici mounted 
upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about 
notional and conjectural essences; in whose cate- 
gories of Being the possible took the upper hand 
of the actual; should have overlooked the imper- 
tinent individualities of such poor concretions as 
mankind, is not much to be admired. It is rather 
to be wondered at, that in the genus of animals he 
should have condescended to distinguish that 
species at all. For myself, earth-bound and fet- 
tered to the scene of my activities, 

Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky. 

I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 107 

national or individual, to an unhealthy excess. I 
can look with no indifferent eye upon things or 
persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste 
or distaste; or when once it becomes indifferent it 
begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, 
a bundle of prejudices, made up of likings and dis- 
likings, the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, 
antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be 
said of me that I am a lover of my species. I can 
feel for all indifferently, but I cannot feel toward 
all equally. The more purely English word that 
expresses sympathy, will better explain my meaning. 
I can be a friend to a worthy man, who upon an- 
other account cannot be my mate or fellow. I can 
not like all people alike.* 

*I would be understood as confining myself to the subject 
of imperfect sympathies. _ To nations or classes of men 
there can be no direct antipathy. There may be individuals 
born and constellated so opposite to another individual 
nature that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have met 
with my moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two 
persons meeting (who never saw one another before in 
their lives) and instantly fighting. 

We by proof find there should be 

'Twixt man and man such an antipathy, 
That though he can show no just reason why 
For any former wrong or injury, 
Can neither find a blemish in_ his fame, 
Nor aught in face or feature justly blame, 
Can challenge or accuse him of no evil. 
Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil. 
The lines are from old Heywood's "Hierarchie of Angels," 
and he subjoins a curious story in confirmation of a Spaniard 
who attempted to assassinate a king Ferdinand of Spain, 
and being put to the rack could give no other reason for 
the deed but an inveterate antipathy which he had taken 
to the first sight of the king. 

The cause which to that act compell'd him 

Was* he ne'er loved him since he first beheld him. 



108 LAMB 

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, 
and am obliged to desist from the experiment in 
despair. They cannot like me — and in truth, I never 
knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. 
There is something more plain and ingenuous in 
their mode of proceeding. We know one another 
at first sight. There is an order of imperfect in- 
tellects (under which mine must be content to rank) 
which in its constitution is essentially anti-Caledo- 
nian. The owners of the sort of faculties I allude 
to, have minds rather suggestive than comprehen- 
sive. They have no pretences to much clearness or 
precision in their ideas, or in their manner of ex- 
pressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to 
confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They 
are content with fragments and scattered pieces of 
Truth. She presents no full front to them — a feature 
or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, 
germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost 
they pretend to. They beat up a little game perad- 
venture — and leave it to knottier heads, more robust 
constitutions, to run it down. The light that lights 
them is not steady and polar, but mutable and 
shifting; waxing, and again waning. Their conver- 
sation is accordingly. They will throw out a ran- 
dom word in or out of season, and be content to let 
it pass for what it is worth. They cannot speak 
always as if they were upon their oath — but must 
be understood, speaking or writing, with some 
abatement. They seldom wait to mature a propo- 
sition, but e'en bring it to market in the green ear. 
They delight to impart their defective discoveries 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 109 

as they arise, without waiting for their full develop- 
mentf They are no systematizers, and would but 
err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said 
before, are suggestive merely. The brain of a true 
Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is constituted 
upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born 
in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas 
in their growth — if, indeed, they do grow, and are 
not rather put together upon principles of clock- 
work. You never catch his mind in an undress. 
He never hints or suggests anything, but unlades 
his stock of ideas in perfect order and complete- 
ness. He brings his total wealth into company, and 
gravely unpacks it. His riches are always about 
him. He never stoops to catch a glittering some- 
thing in your presence to share it with you, before 
he quite knows whether it be true touch or not. 
You cannot cry halves to anything that he finds. 
He does not find, but bring. You never witness 
his first apprehension of a thing. His understand- 
ing is always at its meridian — you never see the 
first dawn, the early streaks. He has no falterings 
of self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, 
half-intuitions, semi-consciousness, partial illumina- 
tions, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no 
place in his brain or vocabulary. The twilight of 
dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox — he 
has no doubts. Is he an infidel — he has none 
either. Between the affirmative and the negative 
there is no border-land with him. You cannot 
hover with him on the confines of truth, or wander 
in the maze of a profeable argument. He always 



110 LAMB 

keeps the path. You cannot make excursions with 
him — for he sets you right. His taste never fluctu- 
ates. His morality never abates. He cannot com- 
promise, or understand middle actions. There can 
be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as 
a book. His affirmations have the sanctity of an 
oath. You must speak upon the square with him. 
He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an 
enemy's country. "A healthy book," said one of 
his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give 
that appellation to John Buncle, "Did I catch rightly 
what you said? I have heard of a man in health, 
and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see 
how that epithet can be properly applied to a book." 
Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions 
before a Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher on your 
irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. 
Remember you are upon your oath. I have a print 
of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which 
I was showing off to Mr. . After he had exam- 
ined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he 
liked my beauty (a foolish name it goes by among 
my friends), when he very gravely assured me, 
that "he had considerable respect for my character 
and talents (so he was pleased to say), but had 
not given himself much thought about the degree of 
my personal pretensions." The misconception stag- 
gered me but did not seem much to disconcert him. 
Persons of this nation are particularly fond of 
affirming a truth — which nobody doubts. They do 
not so properly affirm as annunciate it. They do 
indeed appear to have such a love of truth (as if, 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 111 

like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all 
truth* becomes equally valuable, whether the propo- 
sition that contains it be new or old, disputed, or 
such as is impossiible to become a subject of dis- 
putation. I was present not long since at a party 
of North Britons, where a son of Burns was ex- 
pected; and happened to drop a silly expression 
(in my South British way), that I wished it were 
the father instead of the son — when four of them 
started up at once to inform me, that "that was 
impossible, because he was dead." An impractica- 
ble wish, it seems, was more than they could con- 
ceive. Swift has hit off this part of their character, 
namely their love of truth, in his biting way, but 
with an illiberality that necessarily confines the 
passage to the margin.* The tediousness of these 
people is certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever 
tire one another ! In my early life I had a passion- 
ate fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have some- 
times foolishly hoped to' ingratiate myself with his 
countrymen by expressing it. But I have always 
found that a true Scot resents your admiration of 
his compatriot even more than he would your con- 
tempt of him. The latter he imputes to your "im- 
perfect acquaintance with many of the words which 

*There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit 
themselves, and entertain their company with relating facts 
of no consequence, not at all out of the road of such common 
incidents as happen every day; and this I have observed 
more frequently among the Scots than any other nation, 
who are very careful not to omit the minutest circumstances 
of time or place; which kind of discourse, if it were not a 
little relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases as well as 
accent and gesture peculiar to that country, would be hardly 
tolerable. — Hints toward an Essay on Conversation. 



112 LAMB 

he uses;" and the same objection makes it a pre- 
sumption in you to suppose that you can admire 
him. Thomson they seem to have forgotten. Smol- 
lett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven, for 
his delineation of Rory and his companion, upon 
their first introduction to our metropolis. Speak of 
Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon 
you Hume's History compared with his Continua- 
tion of it. What if the historian had continued 
Humphrey Clinker? 

I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. 
They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared 
with which Stonehenge is in its nonage. They date 
beyond the pyramids. But I should not care to be 
in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that 
nation. I confess that I have not the nerves to en- 
ter their synagogues. Old prejudices cling about 
me. I cannot shake off the story of Hugh of Lin- 
coln. Centuries of injury, contempt and hate, on 
the one side; of cloaked revenge, dissimulation and 
hate, on the other, between our and their fathers, 
must and ought to affect the blood of the children. 
I cannot believe it can run clear and kindly yet; or 
that a few fine words, such as candor, liberality, 
the light of a nineteenth century, can close up the 
breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is 
nowhere congenial to me. He is least distasteful 
on 'Change, for the mercantile spirit levels all dis- 
tinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly 
confess that I do not relish the approximation of 
Jew and Christian, which has become so fashion- 
able. The reciprocal endearments have, to me, 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 113 

something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I 
do not like to see the Church and Synagogue kiss- 
ing and congeeing in awkward postures of an af- 
fected civility. If they are converted, why do they 
not come over to us altogether? Why keep up a 
form of separation, when the life of it is fled? If 
they can sit with us at table, why do they knock 
at our cookery? I do not understand these half 
convertites. Jews christianizing, Christians juda- 
izing, puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A moderate 
Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a 
wet Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essen- 
tially separative. B would have been more in 

keeping if he had abided by the faith of his fore- 
fathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which 
nature meant to be of — Christians. The Hebrew 
spirit is strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. 
He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it breaks 
out when he sings, "The Children of Israel passed 
through the Red Sea !" The auditors, for the mo- 
ment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over 
our necks in triumph. There is no mistaking him. 
B has a strong expression of sense in his coun- 
tenance, and it is confirmed by his singing. The 
foundation of his vocal excellence is sense. He 
sings with understanding, as Kemble delivered dia- 
logue. He would sing the Commandments, and 
give an appropriate character to each prohibition. 
His nation, in general, have not oversensible coun- 
tenances. How should they? but you seldom see 
a silly expression among them. Gain, and the pur- 
suit of gain, sharpen a man's visage. I never heard 



114 LAMB 

of an idiot being born among them. Some admire 
the Jewish female-physiognomy. I admire it, but 
with trembling. Jael had those full dark inscruta- 
ble eyes. 

In the negro countenance you will often meet 
with strong straits of benignity. I have felt yearn- 
ings of tenderness toward some of these faces — or 
rather masks — that have looked out kindly upon 
one in casual encounters in the streets and high- 
ways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls — these 
"images of God cut in ebony." But I should not 
like to associate with them, to share my meals and 
my good nights with them — because they are black. 

I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I ven- 
erate the Quaker principles. It does me good for the 
rest of the day when I meet any of their people in 
my path. When I am ruffled or disturbed by any 
occurrence, the sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker, 
acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and 
taking off a load from the bosom. But I cannot like 
the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) "to live 
with them." I am all over sophisticated — with hu- 
mors, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must 
have books, theaters, chit-chats, scandal, jokes, am- 
biguities and a thousand whim-whams, which their 
simpler taste can do without. I should starve at 
their primitive banquet. My appetites are too high 
for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve 
dressed for the angel ; my gusto too excited 
To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse. 

The indirect answers which Quakers are often 
found to return to a question put to them may be 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 115 

explained, I think, without the vulgar assumption, 
that tfiey are more given to evasion and equivocating 
than other people. They naturally look to ^ their 
words more carefully, and are more cautious of com- 
mitting themselves. They have a peculiar character 
to keep up on this head. They stand in a manner 
upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted 
from taking an oath. The custom of resorting to 
an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all 
religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to 
introduce into the laxer sort of minds the notion of 
two kinds of truth — the one applicable to the solemn 
affairs of justice, and the other to the common pro- 
ceedings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon 
the conscience by an oath can be .but truth, so in 
the common affirmations of the shop and the market- 
place a latitude is expected and conceded upon ques- 
tions wanting this solemn covenant. Something less 
than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person 
say, "You do not expect me to speak as if I were 
upon my oath." Hence a great deal of incorrectness 
and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into 
ordinary conversation ; and a kind of secondary or 
laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy truth — oath- 
truth, by the nature of the circumcstances — is not 
required. A Quaker knows none of this distinction. 
His simple affirmation being received upon the most 
sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps 
a value upon the words which he is to use upon the 
most indifferent topics of life. He looks to them, 
naturally, with more severity. You can have of him 
no more than his word. He knows, if he is caught 



116 LAMB 

tripping in a casual expression, he forfeits, for him- 
self at least, his claim to the invidious exemption. 
He knows that his syllables are weighed — and how 
far a consciousness of this particular watchfulness, 
exerted against a person, has a tendency to produce 
indirect answers, and a diverting of the question by 
honest means, might be illustrated, and the practice 
justified by a more sacred example than is proper 
to be adduced upon this occasion. The admirable 
presence of mind, which is notorious in Quakers 
upon all contingencies, might be traced to this im- 
posed self-watchfulness, if it did not seem rather an 
humble and secular scion of that old stock of reli- 
gious constancy, which never bent or faltered, in the 
Primitive Friends, or gave way to the winds of 
persecution, to the violence of judge or accuser, un- 
der trials and racking examinations. "You will 
never be the wiser, if I sit here answering your ques- 
tions till midnight," said one of those upright Jus- 
tices to Penn, who had been putting law-cases with a 
puzzling subtlety. "Thereafter as the answers may 
be,"-* retorted the Quaker. The astonishing com- 
posure of his people is sometimes ludicrously dis- 
played in lighter instances. I was travelling in a 
stage-coach with three male Quakers, buttoned up 
in the straightest nonconformity of their sect. We 
stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly 
tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. My 
friends confined themselves to the tea-table. I in 
my way took supper. When the landlady brought 
in the bill, the eldest of my companions discovered 
that she had charged for both meals. This was 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 117 

resisted. Mine hostess was very clamorous and posi- 
tive. Some mild arguments were used on the part 
of the* Quakers, for which the heated mind of the 
good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. The 
guard came in with his usual peremptory notice. 
The Quakers pulled out their money and formally 
tendered it — so much for tea — I, in humble imitation, 
tendering mine — for the supper which I had taken. 
She would not relax in her demand. So they all 
three quietly put up their silver, as did myself, and 
marched out of the room, the eldest and gravest 
going first, with myself closing up the rear, who 
thought I could not do better than follow the ex- 
ample of such grave and warrantable personages. 
We got in. The steps went up. The coach drove 
off. The murmurs of mine hostess, not very indis- 
tinctly or ambiguously pronounced, became after a 
time inaudible — and now my conscience, which the 
whimsical scene had for a while suspended, begin- 
ning to give some twitches, I waited in the hope that 
some justification would be offered by these serious 
persons for the seeming injustice of their conduct. 
To my great surprise not a syllable was dropped on 
the subject. Thep sat as mute as at a meeting. 
At length the eldest of them broke silence, by in- 
quiring of his next neighbor, "Hast thee heard how 
indigos go at the India House?" and the question 
operated as a soporific on my moral feeling as far 
as Exeter. 



118 LAMB 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

Sera tamen respexit 
Libertas. — Virgil. 

A Clerk I was in London gay. — O'Keefe. 

If peradventure, reader, it has been thy lot to 
waste the golden years of thy life — thy shining youth 
— in the irksome confinement of an office; to have 
thy prison days prolonged through middle age down 
to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of re- 
lease or respite; to have lived to forget that there 
are such things as holidays, or to remember them 
but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then 
only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance. 

It is now six-and-thirty years since I took my 
seat at the desk in Mincing Lane. Melancholy was 
the transition at fourteen from the abundant play- 
time, and the frequently intervening vacations of 
school-days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten 
hours' a day attendance at the counting-house. But 
time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually 
became content — doggedly contented, as wild animals 
in cages. 

It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sun- 
days, admirable as the institution of them is for 
purposes of worship, are for that very reason the 
very worst adapted for days of unbending recrea- 
tion. In particular, there is a gloom for me attend- 
ant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss 
the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the 
ballad singeis — the buzz and stirring murmur of 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 119 

the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. The 
closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all the 
glittering and endless succession of knacks and gew- 
gaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of trades- 
men, which make a week-day saunter through the 
less busy parts of the metropolis so delightful, are 
shut out. No bookstalls deliciously to idle over, no 
busy faces to recreate the idle man who contem- 
plates them ever passing by — the very face of busi- 
ness a charm by contrast to his temporary relaxa- 
tion from it. Nothing to be seen but unhappy coun- 
tenances — or half-happy at best — of emancipated 
'prentices and little tradesfolks, with here and there 
a servant maid that has got leave to go out, who, 
slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost 
the capacity of enjoying a free hour; and livelily 
expressing the hollowness of a day's pleasuring. 
The very strollers in the fields on that day look 
anything but comfortable. 

But besides Sundays, I had a day at Easter, and 
a day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer 
to go and air myself in my native fields at Hert- 
fordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and 
the prospect of its recurrence I believe, alone kept 
me through the year, and made my durance toler- 
able. But when the week came round, did the 
glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with 
me, or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy 
days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a 
wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the 
most of them? Where was the quiet, where was 
the promised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it 



120 LAMB 

was vanquished. I was at the desk again, counting 
upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must inter- 
vene before such another snatch would come. Still 
the prospect of its coming threw something of an 
illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. 
Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely have 
sustained my thraldom. 

Independently of the rigors of attendance, I have 
ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere 
caprice) of incapacity for business. This, during 
my latter years, had increased to such a degree that 
it was visible in all the lines of my countenance. 
My health and my good spirits flagged. I had 
perpetually a dread of some crisis to which I should 
be found unequal. Besides my daylight servitude, 
I served over again all night in my sleep, and would 
awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, errors 
in my accounts, and the like. I was fifty years of 
age and no prospect of emancipation presented it- 
self. I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the 
wood had entered into my soul. 

My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me 
upon the trouble legible in my countenance; but I 
did not know it had raised the suspicions of any 
of my employers, when, on the fifth of last month, 

a day ever to be remembered by me, L , the 

junior partner in the firm, calling me on one side, 
directly taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly 
inquired the cause of them. So taxed, I honestly 
made confession of my infirmity, and added that 
I was afraid I should eventually be obliged to re- 
sign his service. He spoke some words of course 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 121 

to hearten me, and there the matter rested. A 
whole week I remained laboring under the impres- 
sion tliat I had acted imprudently in my disclosure; 
that I had foolishly given a handle against myself, 
and had been anticipating my own dismissal. A 
week passed in this manner — the most anxious one, 
I verily believe, in my whole life — when on the 
evening of the 12th of April, just as I was about 
quitting my desk to go home (it might be about 
eight o'clock), I received an awful summons to 
attend the presence of the whole assembled firm in 
the formidable back parlor. I thought now my time 
is surely come, I have done for myself, I am going 
to be told that they have no longer occasion for me. 

L , I could see, smiled at the terror I was in, 

which was a little relief to me, when to my utter 

astonishment B , the eldest partner, began a 

formal harangue to me on the length of my serv- 
ices, my very meritorious conduct during the whole 
of the time (the deuce, thought I, how did he find 
out that? I protest I never had the confidence to 
think as much). He went on to descant on the ex- 
pediency of retiring at a certain time of life (how 
my heart panted!), and asking me a few questions 
as to the amount of my own property, of which I 
have a little, ended with a proposal, to which his 
three partners nodded a grave assent, that I should 
accept from the house, which I had served so well, 
a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of 
my accustomed salary — a magnificent offer. I do 
not know what I answered, between surprise and 
gratitude, but it was understood that I accepted 



122 LAMB 

their proposal, and I was told that I was free from 
that hour to leave their service. I stammered out 
a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went 
home — forever. This noble benefit — gratitude for- 
bids me to conceal their names — I owe to the kind- 
ness of the most munificent firm in the world — the 
house of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet and 
Lacy. 

Esto perpetual 

For the first day or two I felt stunned, over- 
whelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; I was 
too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered 
about, thinking I was happy, and knowing that I 
was not. I was in the condition of a prisoner in 
the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty 
years' confinement. I could scarce trust myself with 
myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eter- 
nity — for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have 
all his Time to himself. It seemed to me that I 
had more time on my hands than I could ever 
manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was 
suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see 
no end of my possessions ; I wanted some steward, 
or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time 
for me. And here let me caution persons grown 
old in active business, not lightly, nor without 
weighing their own resources, to forego their cus- 
tomary employment all at once, for there may be 
danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that 
my resources are sufficient; and now that those 
first giddy raptures have subsided, I have a quiet 
home-feeling of the blessedness of my condition. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 123 

I am in no hurry. Having all holidays, I am as 
though I had none. If Time hung heavy upon me, 
I could walk it away; but I do not walk all day long, 
as I used to do in those old transient holidays, 
thirty miles a day, to make the most of them. If 
Time were troublesome, I could read it away; but 
I do not read in that violent measure, with which, 
having no time my own but candlelight Time, I used 
to weary out my head and eyesight in bygone win- 
ters. I walk, read, or scribble (as now) just when 
the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure; 
I let it come to me. I am like the man 

that's born, and has his years come to him, 



In some green desert. 
"Years !" you will say ; "what is this superannuated 
simpleton calculating upon? He has already told 
us he is past fifty." 

I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but 
deduct out of them the hours which I have lived 
to other people, and not to myself, and you will 
find me still a young fellow. For that is the only 
true Time, which a man can properly call his own 
— that which he has all to himself; the rest, though 
in some sense he may be said to live it, is other 
people's Time, not his. The remnant of my poor 
days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me 
threefold. My next ten years, if I stretch so far, 
will be as long as any preceding thirty. 'Tis a fair 
rule-of-three sum. 

Among the strange fantasies which beset me at 
the commencement of my freedom, and of which all 
traces are not yet gone, one was, that a vast tract 



124 LAMB 

of time had intervened since I quitted the Counting- 
house. I could not conceive of it as an affair of 
yesterday. The partners, and the clerks with whom 
I had for so many years, and for so many hours in 
each day of the year, been closely associated — being 
suddenly removed from them — they seemed as dead 
to me. There is a fine passage which may serve to 
illustrate this fancy in a Tragedy by Sir Robert 
Howard, speaking of a friend's death : 



-'Twas but just now he went away; 



I have not since had time to shed a tear; 
And yet the distance does the same appear 
As if he had been a thousand years from me. 
Time takes no measure in Eternity. 

To dissipate this awkward feeling, I have been fain 
to go among them once or twice since ; to visit 
my old desk-fellows — my co-brethren of the quill — 
that I had left below in the state militant. Not all 
the kindness with which the}'- received me could 
quite restore to me that pleasant familiarity which 
I had heretofore enjoyed among them. We cracked 
some of our old jokes, but methought they went 
off but faintly. My old desk, the peg where I hung 
my hat, were appropriated to another. I knew it 

must be, but I could not take it kindly. D 1 

take me, if I did not feel some remorse — beast, 
if I had not — at quitting my old compeers, the faith- 
ful partners of my toils for six-and-thirty years, 
that soothed for me with their jokes and conun- 
drums the ruggedness of my professional road. Had 
it been so rugged then, after all? or was I a coward 
simply? Well, it is too late to repent; and I also 
know that these suggestions are a common fallacy 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 125 

of the mind on such occasions. But my heart smote 
me. I had violently broken the bands betwixt us. 
It was - at least not courteous. It shall be some 
time before I get quite reconciled to the separa- 
tion. Farewell, old cronies, yet not for long, for 
again and again I will come among ye, if I shall 

have your leave. Farewell, Ch , dry, sarcastic, 

and friendly ! Do , mild, slow to move, and 

gentlemanly ! PI , officious to do, and to vol- 
unteer, good services ! and thou, thou dreary pile, 
fit mansion for a Gresham or a Whittington of 
old, stately house of Merchants ; with thy laby- 
rinthine passages, and light-excluding, pent-up of- 
fices, where candles for one-half the year supplied 
the place of the sun's light ; unhealthy contributor 
to my weal, stern fosterer of my living, farewell ! 
In thee remain, and not in the obscure recollection 
of some wandering book-seller, my "works !" There 
let them rest, as I do from my labors, piled on thy 
massy shelves, more MSS. in folio than ever Aqui- 
nas left, and full as useful. My mantle I bequeath 
among ye. 

A fortnight has passed since the date of my first 
communication. At that period I was approaching 
to tranquillity, but had not reached it. I boasted of 
a calm indeed, but it was comparative only. Some- 
thing of the first flutter was left; an unsettling 
sense of novelty; the dazzle to weak eyes of unac- 
customed light. I missed my old chains, forsooth, 
as if they had been some necessary part of my 
apparel. I was a poor Carthusian, from strict 
cellular discipline suddenly by some revolution re- 



126 LAMB 

turned upon the world. I am now as if I had 
never been other than my own master. I find 
myself at eleven o'clock in the day in Bond Street, 
and it seems to me that I have been sauntering 
there at that very hour for years past. I digress 
into Soho, to explore a book-stall. Methinks I have 
been thirty years a collector. There is nothing 
strange nor new in it. I find myself before a fine 
picture in the morning. Was it ever otherwise? 
What is become of Fish Street Hill? Where is 
Fenchurch Street? Stones of old Mincing Lane, 
which I have worn with my daily pilgrimage for 
six-and-thirty years, to the footsteps of what toil- 
worn clerk are your everlasting flints now vocal? I 
indent the gayer flags of Pall Mall. It is 'Change 
time, and I am strangely among the Elgin marbles. 
It was no hyperbole when I ventured to compare 
the change in my condition to passing into another 
world. Time stands still in a manner to me. I 
have lost all distinction of season. I do not know 
the day of the week or of the month. Each day 
used to be individually felt by me in its reference 
to the foreign post-days ; in its distance from, or 
propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednes- 
day feelings, my Saturday night's sensations. The 
genius of each day was upon me distinctly during the 
whole of it, effecting my appetite, spirits, etc. The 
phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to 
follow, sat as a load upon my poor Sabbath recre- 
ations. What charm has washed that Ethiop white? 
What is gone of Black Monday r All days are the 
same. Sunday itself — that unfortunate failure of a 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 127 

holiday, as it too often proved, what with my 
sense of fugitiveness, and over-care to get the 
greatesr quantity of pleasure out of it — is melted 
down into a weekday. I can spare to go to church 
now, without grudging the huge cantle which it 
used to seem to cut out of the holiday. I have time 
for everything. I can visit a sick friend. I can 
interrupt the man of much occupation when he is 
busiest. I can insult over him with an invitation 
to take a day's pleasure with me to Windsor this 
fine May morning. It is Lucretian pleasure to be- 
hold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind 
in the world, carking and caring; like horses in a 
mill, drudging on in the same eternal round — and 
what is it all for? A man can never have too much 
Time to himself, nor too little to^do. Had I a 
little son, I would christen him Nothing-to-do; he 
should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of 
his element as long as he is operative. I am alto- 
gether for the life contemplative. Will no kindly 
earthquake come and swallow up those accursed 
cotton-mills? Take me that lumber of a desk 
there, and bowl it down 

As low as to the fiends. 

I am no longer , clerk to the firm of, etc. I 

am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim 
gardens. I am already come to be known by my 
vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at 
no fixed pace, nor with any settled purpose. I walk 
about; not to and from. They tell me, a certain 
cum dignitate air, that has been buried so long with 
my other good parts, has begun to shoot forth in 



128 LAMB 

my person. I grow into gentility perceptibly. When 
I take up a newspaper, it is to read the state of the 
opera. Opus operatum est. I have done all that 
I came into this world to do. I have worked task- 
work, and have the rest of the day to myself. 



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